The First Time

Feb 13, 2017 — One Scene Romantic love is poignant because it is an infinite feeling that exists in a finite frame. And Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy is the most romantic and profound of love stories because it imbues love with the weight of...

May 11, 2016 — Repertory PicksTonight, as part of the month-long series Rossellini: Restored and Revisited, the Austin Film Society in Austin, Texas, will screen Roberto Rossellini’s 1950 existential masterpiece Stromboli. Starring the radiant Ingrid Bergman, the film was the pair’s first screen collaboration,...

Oct 30, 2015 — The following interview was originally published in the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews included in the book were conducted by Rodley between 1993 and 2005. For Criterion’s release of Mulholland Dr.,...

Feb 17, 2015 — It was never, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s intention that An Autumn Afternoon (1962) should be the final film of his thirty-­five­-year career as a writer­-director. Indeed, before he died on his sixtieth birthday, in December 1963, he had made notes...

Aug 25, 2014 — Love and death tango in Bob Fosse’s glittering ode to his own mortality.

May 1, 2014 — When Walter Wanger conceived the movie that would become Riot in Cell Block 11, he wasn’t thinking in terms of pop culture. The longtime independent film producer, with classics (and Criterion releases) such as Stagecoach and Foreign Correspondent to his...

Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.

Oct 11, 2012 — On October 11, 1987, David Mamet’s first film, the diabolically tricky House of Games, made its U.S. premiere as the closing-night selection of the New York Film Festival. Mamet had already conquered the world of theater, winning a Pulitzer Prize...

Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.

Feb 15, 2012 — Comedy evolves. We long ago bid adieu to the physical acrobatics of Buster Keaton, the wisecracks of Bob Hope, the witty repartee of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. The now-reigning comedy of embarrassment, seen in the films of Judd Apatow...