How the West Was Won

Feb 25, 2025 — Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.

Oct 27, 2021 — Channel Calendars Celebrate Noirvember on the Criterion Channel with a tribute to the cool-as-ice Robert Mitchum, whose nonchalance and quiet menace made him a defining presence in American cinema’s underworld. Or enjoy the sophisticated, pitch-dark pulp classics in our Fox...

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...

Feb 9, 2016 — Jan Troell’s narration of one Swedish couple’s arduous journey to America portrays the migratory quality of marriage—of “finding that you think of this person who is not you, or this place that is not the land of your birth, as...

Oct 14, 2014 — What happens offscreen is as important as what’s on- in John Ford’s subtle, elegiac take on the Wyatt Earp–Doc Holliday story.

Feb 18, 2025 — In her mainstream breakthrough, director Joan Micklin Silver envisions New York City through the eyes of a complicated, searching woman trying to figure out her place in the world.

Jan 28, 2025 — We’re reading about Wes Anderson and David Cronenberg and looking forward to books on David Lynch and Pedro Almodóvar.

Nov 15, 2021 — Paul Newman’s forthcoming memoir, Bill Gunn’s 1981 novel, and Melissa Anderson’s Inland Empire are among this month’s notable titles.

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...

May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...