The British Desk

Dec 10, 2009 — Upon its U.S. release in the fall of 1969, Costa-Gavras’s Z made a splash unprecedented for a non-Hollywood film: star Yves Montand talked it up to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and the film went on to gross $2.2...

May 29, 2025 — The rise of fascism upended the childhoods of both filmmakers.

Nov 9, 2009 — The following essay, written in October 1987, after the release of Wings of Desire, originally appeared in The Logic of Images, a collection of Wim Wenders’s writing that was published in 1992. In the last few years, since Paris, Texas, Berlin...

Jul 16, 2013 — Theater legend Peter Brook’s approach to bringing the classic fable about human savagery to the screen was radical in its straightforwardness.

Nov 13, 2025 — The director of Rat Trap and Monologue was an uncompromising artist who helped establish the Indian state of Kerala as a hub of bold political filmmaking.

Mar 17, 2026 — In her first and only theatrical feature, director Lynne Littman presents an unbearably intimate vision of apocalypse, focusing on the effects of a nuclear blast on one suburban American family.

Jan 21, 2020 — The Mankiewicz brothers, Jonas Mekas, Werner Herzog, Sidney Lumet, and Ja’Tovia Gary all figure in this month’s roundup.

Apr 24, 2019 — Channel Calendars The Women (1939) It’s going to be a packed month on the Criterion Channel, with a spotlight on the unforgettable female characters of a classic Hollywood master, a tribute to the great Japanese cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, a new...

Jan 11, 2017 — A revelatory restoration of Lewis Milestone’s underappreciated newsroom comedy accentuates the film’s punchy rhythms and breakneck banter.

Apr 21, 2021 — First Person The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he...