The Star

Nov 11, 2015 — There’s an infectious energy and excitement that radiates from the French actor and filmmaker Mathieu Amalric. This is palpable in his performances on-screen or on the stage, and it was in full force when he visited Criterion recently.

Dec 7, 2010 — “Eroticism,” Luis Buñuel told an interviewer, “is a diabolic pleasure that is related to death and rotting flesh.” No filmmaker conveys this idea with more ingenuity and macabre gusto than David Cronenberg, whose movies (hilariously, terrifyingly) illustrate the equation of...

Nov 25, 2010 — Five Easy Pieces is not a statement about America but a closely observed report. Or, perhaps, a confession.

Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...

Oct 28, 2007 — When I started preparing for a new transfer of The Ice Storm, I asked director Ang Lee if he wanted to supervise the session. Ang said that he’d like the cinematographer, Fred Elmes, to supervise, and that he would come...

Feb 12, 2007 — Vittorio De Sica’s seminal drama renounces “egoism” for collective concern, envisioning a cinema of impassioned social conscience.

Jul 9, 2001 — Director Bruce Robinson reminisces about the days that inspired his uproarious black comedy.

Apr 22, 2026 — “The wig has a name. The wig’s name is Pam.”I was not even a little surprised to hear that Dallas-born filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary had given a name to the bouncy brown bob she wears in her film The Giverny Document...

Mar 28, 2022 — Rosine Mbakam’s documentaries are exercises in reconfiguring relations of power. Her first three nonfiction features are all portraits of Cameroonian women, each of whom is invited to participate in coconstructing a cinematic space of testimony, candor, and expressive autonomy. Filmed...

Jun 24, 2020 — 1.     In 1996, Martin Scorsese’s mother, Catherine—who costars in his 1974 documentary portrait Italianamerican, one of the five early films by the director collected in our new release—collaborated with author Georgia Downard on Italianamerican: The Scorsese Family Cookbook. Among the...