The Silent One

May 30, 2017 — Now that the Cannes Film Festival has wrapped, we’ve got some catching up to do. Let’s begin with Scout Tafoya’s report for the Village Voice on a recent symposium “on film criticism and scholarship commemorating the legacy of German film...

May 20, 2017 — “Custody of a white horse is one of several bones of contention between Bulgarian locals and visiting German laborers in Valeska Grisebach’s Western, a dispute that takes on the most classic symbolic dimension of the traditional oater,” begins Guy Lodge...

May 18, 2017 — “Todd Haynes’s films, intellectually rigorous and often profoundly moving, are fractured stories in which alienated, beautiful characters try to find love (or a certain likeness) in the delicate folds of real life,” begins David Ehrlich at IndieWire. “All of this...

Feb 3, 2017 — Over on the Criterion Channel, for Super Bowl weekend, we’re showing the first football movie ever made, Harold Lloyd’s crackerjack comedy The Freshman (1925), and the first rugby-football movie ever made, Lindsay Anderson’s heart-pounding drama This Sporting Life (1963). And...

Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.

Sep 19, 2016 — If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop.

May 12, 2016 — When director Amy Heckerling visited Criterion, she reflected on her days as a struggling filmmaker, the allure and disappointment of moving to the West Coast, and her love for old-Hollywood actors.

Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.

Aug 17, 2015 — François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.

May 11, 2015 — The poignancy of Leo McCarey's tearjerker is due as much to the director's scrupulous aesthetic choices as his unforgettable characters and story.