Character

Dec 21, 2016 — Under the InfluenceEarlier this month, director Mike Mills paid a visit to New York in support of his third narrative feature, 20th Century Women, a deeply personal coming-of-age tale about a teenage boy growing up in Carter-era Southern California with...

Dec 18, 2016 — Imogen Sara Smith examines the tensions between tradition and modernity reflected in two silent crime films by Yasujiro Ozu and Tomu Uchida.

Dec 16, 2016 — Earlier this week, we released our edition of John Huston’s 1950 heist film The Asphalt Jungle, whose combination of meticulous plotting and sympathetic characterization remains a blueprint for the genre. Set amid the smoky streets of an unnamed city in...

Dec 16, 2016 — One of the most ambitious achievements of Italian master Ermanno Olmi’s career, The Tree of Wooden Clogs opens at New York’s Film Forum today in a ravishing new 4K restoration, supervised by the director himself. Made in close collaboration with...

Dec 14, 2016 — Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.

Dec 12, 2016 — Patriotic masterminds choreograph capers from secret headquarters while dashing secret agents execute their plans by the light of flashing blades and gunfire. Jeopardy escalates second to second until our heroes and heroines escape by the skin of their teeth. Spy...

Dec 5, 2016 — A biting satire of bourgeois frivolity, the 1962 surrealist masterpiece The Exterminating Angel is one of Spanish auteur Luis Buñuel’s most macabre creations. In this follow-up to the scandalous, Palme d’Or–winning Viridiana, Silvia Pinal and an ensemble of Buñuel regulars...

Nov 30, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating the seventy-third birthday of one of American cinema’s most lyrical and enigmatic storytellers. Over the course of more than four decades, Terrence Malick has established a distinctive aesthetic that juxtaposes the majestic beauty of nature with the...

Nov 22, 2016 — I don’t do psychoanalysis, I do cinema. —Athina Rachel TsangariThis week, over on the Criterion Channel, we’re kicking off Meet the Filmmakers, an exclusive new series of encounters with directors we’re excited to champion. For each program, we’ve enlisted a...

Nov 18, 2016 — Artists across all mediums have long been obsessed with the challenge of evoking dream states, but film—with its oneiric combinations of light and shadow, and its ability to manipulate time and space—has particularly uncanny access to our nighttime reveries. Whether...