In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Sep 16, 2020 — When I think of Albert Brooks, the first image that invariably comes to mind is that of a worry-stricken man desperately impressing his anxieties upon a bemused, notably less nebbishy partner, presenting an elaborate case for the legitimacy of those...

Mar 6, 2020 — Above photo: © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLCIn America, black musical genius has never been in short supply, though it hasn’t always been recognized or fairly compensated. Even a casual glance at the résumé of formally trained composer, producer, and arranger...

Sep 3, 2019 — The twenty-five-year-old Marco Bellocchio certainly didn’t pull any punches with his stylish, subversive debut feature. Following a young man (Lou Castel) in the provinces who sets out to do away with his own dysfunctional family, Fists in the Pocket (1965)...

May 21, 2019 — Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (2017) is one of the great films about middle-aged loneliness, specifically—though not exclusively—as women feel it. It’s not a dating movie, though there’s dating in it. And it’s not a feeling-sorry-for-oneself movie, though there are...

Apr 26, 2019 — In conceiving the journey of Lonesome Rhodes—the protagonist of the 1957 satire A Face in the Crowd, a southern drifter who rises to become a national TV celebrity and political power broker—director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg went on...

Apr 8, 2019 — We just launched the new Criterion Channel today, and we’re hitting the ground running with a lineup of outstanding film noirs produced by Columbia Pictures between the midforties and the early sixties, after the company had risen from its humble...

Feb 22, 2019 — If I were to list the criteria for my ideal project, creating a sculpture of Tadzio, the young boy from Death in Venice, for a Criterion release of Luchino Visconti’s adaptation would just about tick off all the boxes. Firstly, I love cinema,...

Jan 29, 2019 — In the Heat of the Night (1967) opens with an air of mystery, of outsiderness winding its way into the small town of Sparta, Mississippi, a place that right away seems heavy with a sense of what belongs and what...

Jun 15, 2018 — Coming up at the turn of the seventies, Philippine filmmaker Lino Brocka made a name for himself directing nine studio movies—many of them melodramas and romances that proved popular with local critics and audiences—in the span of just two years....

Jun 4, 2018 — For the production design on Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, director Paul Schrader turned to famed graphic designer Eiko Ishioka. The below images of her groundbreaking sets, as well as this excerpted text, first appeared in the 2000 book...