The Promise

Sep 22, 2009 — One enters any major film festival with hopes of discovering a budding auteur, a new voice from some previously unheard-from part of the world—a Julián Hernández or Corneliu Porumboiu or Bong Joon-ho. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, however,...

Feb 18, 2020 — In what was no doubt an appeal to subtitle-averse audiences, advertisements for the U.S. release of Teorema (1968) trumpeted, “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema—but it says everything!” A meager few of those utterances are expended in an...

Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...

Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

Jan 21, 2014 — Bigger is better in Stanley Kramer’s crazily crammed slapstick epic, a timeless showcase for comedy genius.

Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...

Oct 12, 2011 — Our own Kim Hendrickson and Susan Arosteguy will be in Columbus, Ohio, tonight to discuss movies—and monsters—at the Wexner Center for the Arts. At 7 p.m., in an event the Wexner’s website promises will be a “behind-the-scenes look at Criterion’s...

Sam Rohdie is professor of cinema studies at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of Montage, Promised Lands, Fellini Lexicon, Rocco and His Brothers, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Antonioni. This piece originally appeared in...

Aug 20, 2026 — A retrospective spotlights the writer’s collaborations with Carol Reed, Fritz Lang, John Ford, Alberto Cavalcanti, and George Cukor.

Nov 15, 2022 — An ongoing series spotlights films by women directors made in eastern Europe during the Soviet era.