Written on the Wind

Feb 14, 2025 — The director of Down with Love talks about his favorite romantic comedies set in the great metropolis and looks back on the making of his own foray into the genre.

Aug 27, 2024 — A brilliant satire, inspired by a 1973 PBS documentary series that gave rise to the reality-television genre, Albert Brooks’s first feature film examines the ethical dilemmas of combining cheap entertainment and sociological experiment.

Aug 21, 2024 — This month brings a new biography of Agnès Varda, collections from Phillip Lopate and Jonathan Rosenbaum, and some hefty coffee-table accessories.

Jan 30, 2024 — A kaleidoscopic work of literary adaptation, Dee Rees’s fourth feature film is anchored in a powerful fraternal bond between two men from opposite sides of the color line.

Jul 11, 2023 — Martin Scorsese drew on the influence of Hitchcock and Kafka for this anxiety-ridden tale of one bizarre night in New York City—a movie that energized him during a tumultuous period in his career.

Nov 23, 2022 — Featured in this month’s roundup: Maya Deren, Joyce Chopra, Michael Almereyda, Nabokov, Pasolini, and Miyazaki.

Oct 26, 2022 — The ’80s Horror collection now playing on the Criterion Channel brings together some of my favorite films from a time when the horror genre took on strange and thrilling new forms. When I began programming it, my thoughts drifted back...

Feb 11, 2022 — The director discusses the making of his 1979 cult road movie, Radio On, which is now streaming exclusively on the Criterion Channel, and the influence of New German Cinema on his visual style.

Jan 14, 2022 — This week we’re watching and reading about Tom Noonan, Jean Vigo, Marie-Claude Treilhou, and Miklós Jancsó.

Nov 22, 2021 — Songbook Tootsie is a film about love and desire. Audiences are prone to forgetting this amid the controversies that have arisen around its gender-crossing conceit. Back in 1982, the film emerged as one of the decade’s prestige comedies: it was...