Shadow Play

Oct 15, 2019 — The witch has a long history in Western cinema. Nowadays, we tend to associate her with horror, but early depictions resist easy categorization. She appeared in American silent films as early as 1908 (in a short called The Witch). The...

Oct 15, 2019 — Born in Denmark to a wealthy family in 1879, Benjamin Christensen dropped out of medical school to receive training as an opera singer, only to lose his singing voice to what was diagnosed as an incurable nervous illness. He then...

Sep 4, 2019 — With their novelistic density and sexual openness, the films of French master André Téchiné introduced director Stephen Cone to a strange new world of contradictions.

Aug 21, 2019 — One Scene One of my absolute favorite quotes from Douglas Sirk—and he has a million of ’em—was made in reference to Magnificent Obsession. “It is a combination of kitsch and craziness and trashiness,” he said (this isn’t the quote quite...

Jul 23, 2019 — He even walks in stereo. So proclaims a kid on a stoop toward the beginning of Do the Right Thing; he’s stunned by the sun but also by the sight and sound of Radio Raheem. Raheem is silent but so...

May 29, 2019 — In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building...

May 21, 2019 — Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017) is one of the great films about middle-aged loneliness, specifically—though not exclusively—as women feel it. It’s not a dating movie, though there’s dating in it. And it’s not a feeling-sorry-for-oneself movie, though there are...

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...

Apr 8, 2019 — We just launched the new Criterion Channel today, and we’re hitting the ground running with a lineup of outstanding film noirs produced by Columbia Pictures between the midforties and the early sixties, after the company had risen from its humble...

Feb 19, 2019 — A master at adapting literary classics for the screen, Luchino Visconti made a bold choice in emphasizing the homoerotic undertones in Thomas Mann’s novella.