Star in the Night

Jul 24, 2017 — On Friday, we posted an entry on all that’s known—and speculated—about the seventy-fourth edition of the the Venice International Film Festival running from August 30 through September 9. Over the weekend the festival filled out the juries. Annette Bening will...

Jul 17, 2017 — “Martin Landau, the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood, died Saturday in Los Angeles,” reports Anita Gates...

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...

Jul 12, 2016 — Herk Harvey’s influential, low-budget horror classic Carnival of Souls is an eerie exploration of the mutability of place and the purgatorial state of dreaming.

Nov 3, 2015 — We present an excerpt from the book David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, by Dennis Lim.

Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...

May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...

Jan 26, 2010 — "All roads lead to Rome Open City,” Jean-Luc Godard once said, playing on the old Italian proverb—and meaning, we can assume, that when thinking about modern cinema, one always has to come to terms with Roberto Rossellini’s seminal film. Indeed,...

Dec 10, 2009 — Upon its U.S. release in the fall of 1969, Costa-Gavras’s Z made a splash unprecedented for a non-Hollywood film: star Yves Montand talked it up to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and the film went on to gross $2.2...

Aug 24, 2009 — Whit Stillman took a risk when he set his third film during (and titled it after) the disco era, whose erstwhile existence, from almost the moment it ended, has seemed to embarrass most Americans more than Watergate. One would think...