The Criterion Collection
May 22, 2020 — The Times of Harvey Milk Today—May 22, 2020—would have been Harvey Milk’s ninetieth birthday. Harvey was forty-five when I first met him in his camera store; I was nineteen. Harvey was murdered when he was just forty-eight, and I’m now...
May 8, 2020 — The opening and closing credits in a film are a form of housekeeping, fulfilling a legal obligation to compile the names of cast and crew who made the final product possible. Visionary designer Saul Bass saw the aesthetic potential in...
Apr 28, 2020 — “Fuck! Fuck you fuck me fuck old people fuck children fuck peace! Fuck peace.”Miranda July shouts at her car’s steering wheel. With a black Sharpie, she scrawls FUCK in huge letters on the inside of her windshield. She drives. Sunlight...
Apr 14, 2020 — Whether or not you believe it is the greatest year of all for the Hollywood studio system, the wonder of 1939 is the sheer depth of its bench. On a ten-movie best-picture ballot, the Oscars found no room to nominate...
Features
Mar 18, 2020 — People talk a lot about the way that Rita Hayworth looked. She was the Hollywood “love goddess,” with a sensational figure, a dazzling smile, and hair that fell in long, auburn waves. The pinup so iconic that her posters were...
Jan 21, 2020 — One of the lesser-known films in Godard’s extraordinary run of 1960s masterpieces, this severe, angular thriller was the director’s first foray into the political territory that would prove so essential to his later work.
Jan 13, 2020 — A key figure of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Passer went on to direct a classic American neonoir.
Aug 13, 2019 — Something uncanny is brewing in George Sikharulidze’s Fatherland. This darkly comedic film transports us to a spring evening in Joseph Stalin’s birthplace—Gori, Georgia—where the townspeople have gathered on the sixty-third anniversary of their long-departed leader’s death. What follows is part...
The Daily
Aug 2, 2019 — Extraordinarily long movies, challenging movies, and even ugly movies figure into this week’s round.
Features
Jul 10, 2019 — En route to the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 2006, I stopped off for some sightseeing in Prague. Having dutifully made the rounds of the city’s hopping tourist spots, I retreated to my bare-bones hotel...