This Happy Breed

Sep 9, 2020 — Performances In the mid-1960s, the Bengali director Mrinal Sen reportedly accused his contemporary Satyajit Ray of selling out. “Mrinal said—now he has sunk to the level of using a matinee idol!” Ray would later laugh to his biographer, Andrew Robinson....

Jan 25, 2019 — Deep into Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, we sit in on a leisurely dinner-table chat that appears to be unrelated to the film’s main event, an illegal abortion conducted in a seedy hotel. After...

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.

Mar 25, 2014 — Silent comedy superstar Harold Lloyd played big dreamers; few were more determined to succeed than the college football player Harold Lamb.

Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...

Aug 21, 2012 — Andrew Haigh’s boy-meets-boy story reminds us that the biggest pleasures of falling in love come from the little moments of connection.

Oct 27, 2003 — Attuned to the ineffable weirdness and crushing mundanity of workplace paranoia, Steven Soderbergh’s film finds anger and sorrow in the way we brutalize our means of communication

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...