The After

Oct 25, 2009 — Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing...

Nov 23, 2006 — I first met Robert Altman in person in 1999, when I was producing a series of video introductions featuring contemporary directors discussing their favorite Janus films. Altman was the first Criterion director to respond to our request. We had sent...

Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.

Feb 2, 2004 — A story about defeat and failure, Robert Bresson’s masterpiece is a milestone in the slow process of the liberation of postwar French cinema

Apr 19, 1994 — Rivaled only by Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst as Germany’s greatest director of the silent age, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a tireless formal innovator exhilaratingly difficult to pin down. If his 1922 horror epic Nosferatu represented an apex of...

Jan 5, 1993 — All right, I’ll just say it. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the most sublimely irreverent, most jaw-droppingly hysterical movie of the last twenty years. How many films, after all, have Knights who say “Ni!,” filth-eating peasants, and 160...

Feb 29, 1988 — Marx Brothers aficionados have argued for years over the relative merits of A Night at the Opera and the “purer” Marx movies such as Duck Soup. Certainly there’s no comparison on a point-by-point basis: Duck Soup is a classic of...

May 28, 2024 — In Karyn Kusama’s award-winning feature debut, Michelle Rodriguez delivers a smoldering performance as a young woman who finds in boxing a container for her grief, loss, and rage.

Jan 21, 2022 — In a series of tautly constructed dramas that imbue the everyday struggles of married life with suspense and tragedy, filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has proven himself a remarkable observer of the social, moral, and personal dimensions that shape contemporary Iranian society....

Jun 14, 2021 — Postwar Hollywood’s quintessential heavy wields his signature mix of brutality and neurosis to embody an abusive husband in Max Ophuls’s psychological drama.