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Jan 9, 2017 — Since its inception more than a half-century ago, the National Society of Film Critics has maintained its reputation for championing idiosyncratic and independent voices during the commercially driven awards season, with past best picture awards going to films like Michelangelo...

Jul 10, 2016 — The author, a filmmaker and film professor who cowrote a book on Abbas Kiarostami, remembers the late Iranian director.

Mar 29, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating the release on Blu-ray and DVD of Les Blank’s legendary Leon Russell music documentary A Poem Is a Naked Person. And while we’re on the topic of fascinating nonfiction filmmaking, we’re also taking a look at a...

Mar 24, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, the University of Chicago’s Doc Films kicks off a two-month-long Abbas Kiarostami series, starting with the Iranian director’s 1990 masterwork Close-up. Taken from the real-life story of Hossain Sabzian, a young man put on trial in Tehran...

Feb 4, 2016 — Repertory PicksLast month, the International House Philadelphia, in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania, kicked off a series called Cinema, Censorship, and the Scandal of Sex, selecting four films that “have been seen as an outrage to decency, morality, religious...

Dec 3, 2015 — Repertory PicksIn advance of the upcoming release of Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, The Hateful Eight, Chicago’s Music Box Theatre will host a week-long series called Tarantino & Friends that begins tomorrow and includes a selection of films that influenced the...

Sep 11, 2014 — In this short interview, a Criterion online exclusive, the Oscar-winning actor Penélope Cruz talks about the immense inspiration she drew at a young age from the work of Pedro Almodóvar, who would later become a friend and collaborator of hers—and...

Aug 18, 2014 — The filmmaker and critic discuss the pleasures and provocations of the Spanish auteur’s work.

Jun 22, 2010 — In the autumn of 1989, the Iranian magazine Sorush printed a story about an unusual crime: a poor man had been arrested for impersonating a celebrated film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to a middle-class family in northern Tehran. Although the accused,...

Dec 5, 1988 — This existential thriller didn’t begin its life as a cannily trendy product of studio filmmaking, but rather as the very personal expression of the imagination of one of European art cinema’s greatest talents, Michelangelo Antonioni.