The Reading

Feb 5, 2021 — This week we’re reading Nick Pinkerton on Fassbinder’s problems with Chabrol and revisiting films by Marguerite Duras, Lizzie Borden, and Béla Tarr.

Nov 29, 2019 — American gangsters, Chinese filmmakers, and a Czech animator are featured in this week’s round.

Oct 9, 2019 — The Internet’s hardcore feline obsession may seem harmless, but is there something darker at play behind the millions of memes and GIFs it generates, or the eager crowds who gather to meet online animal celebrities like Grumpy Cat (R.I.P.)? In...

Jul 1, 2018 — In one of Criterion’s earliest commentary tracks, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader talk about how they got lucky with their gripping New York City classic.

May 24, 2018 — The late novelist’s work has proven to be an all but insurmountable challenge to screenwriters—but there’s hope.

Apr 8, 2014 — In telling the story of the young outcast Antoine Doinel, François Truffaut was moving both backward and forward in time—recalling his own experience while forging a filmic language that would grow more sophisticated throughout the 1960s.

Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.

Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...

Jul 11, 2023 — Martin Scorsese drew on the influence of Hitchcock and Kafka for this anxiety-ridden tale of one bizarre night in New York City—a movie that energized him during a tumultuous period in his career.

Mar 20, 2023 — The author of the novel Fiona and Jane looks back on a relationship that never quite solidified—and a future that never quite arrived—through the prism of Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.