The Ride

Dec 6, 2019 — Starting this weekend on the Criterion Channel, you’ll be able to steal some time with one of cinema’s most pulse-pounding subgenres. In the heist movie, even the most perfectly planned crimes run the risk of going awry, putting the mettle...

Oct 1, 2019 — Charlie Chaplin’s sidesplitting The Circus, the last movie he made during the silent era, is a true testament to the man’s genius, not only as a comedian in front of the camera but also as a director behind it. The...

Nov 15, 2017 — “Two exhibitions on different sides of the Atlantic—Marlene Dietrich: Dressed for the Image at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, through April 15; and Obsession Marlene at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris through Jan. 7—explore how...

Oct 4, 2017 — We begin with Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker about Alain Gomis’s Félicité, “a dramatic portrait of a fierce, intrepid woman—a single mother and a powerfully expressive cabaret singer (Véro Tshanda Beya Mputu) in Kinshasa who is wrenched from...

Apr 12, 2016 — Howard Hawks’s 1939 aviation classic Only Angels Have Wings is an exemplar of the auteurist Hollywood entertainer’s capability to fuse “a personal existential statement and a delightful piece of showmanship.”

May 27, 2014 — Howard Hawks was both a skillful Hollywood craftsman and a deeply personal artist, and this western of uncommon wit and grandeur is among his greatest and quirkiest films.

Dec 2, 2013 — With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.

Oct 17, 2011 — Scratch the surface of a contemporary J-horror classic like Ringu (1998) or any of the Ju-on films (2000–03) and you’ll glimpse Yabu no naka no kuroneko (Black Cat from the Grove), released in the U.S. as simply Kuroneko (1968). Shot...

Nov 3, 2009 — If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece.

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....