The Criterion Collection
Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...
Dec 3, 2019 — Performances If there was one mother-daughter television date my busy mum was always willing to down tools for, it was a Bette Davis movie. Her favorite—and mine, for the preteen period when I gave the thumbs-up to anything my mother...
Jul 20, 2018 — American audiences weren’t ready for Barbara Loden’s Wanda when it premiered in 1970. A stark portrait of a working-class woman (played with raw conviction by Loden herself) who breaks free of a miserable marriage, only to find herself on the...
Sneak Peeks
Jan 30, 2017 — It wasn’t until the second half of his life that Senegalese master Ousmane Sembène dedicated himself to cinema, with his debut feature, Black Girl, premiering in 1966 when he was forty-three. Already an acclaimed novelist, Sembène had lived in France...
Essays
Dec 14, 2016 — Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.
Sep 14, 2015 — In his latest column, Peter Cowie reflects on his friendship with our beloved cofounder.
Oct 28, 2014 — What you hear is as crucial—and as funny—as what you see in Tati’s films.
Sneak Peeks
Jun 25, 2013 — For our new release of Shoah, director Claude Lanzmann sat down with critic Serge Toubiana to talk about his philosophy and approach in making the formidable investigation into the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. One of the...
In Theaters
Jun 21, 2012 — Austin film programmer Jesse Trussell tells us about what goes into curating this long-running series.
Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...