A Lost Life

Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...

Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills⁠—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...

Jan 7, 2020 — The filmmaker, theater director, and Actors Studio instructor had a seemingly endless string of stories to tell.

Jan 3, 2020 — The director of Margaret and Manchester by the Sea celebrates Hollywood’s greatest humanist, whose films are featured in a series now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Sep 10, 2019 — In this landmark melodrama, director Ritwik Ghatak channeled his grief over the destruction of his beloved homeland, Bengal, in the wake of the Partition of India.

Jul 17, 2019 — In Spain, as Pedro Almodóvar was getting ready to leave home, no young man argued with his father about politics, no one wanted to discuss or refight the Civil War. Instead, the argument was about the length of your hair,...

Mar 26, 2019 — It’s the afternoon of February 8, 1964, and Ed Sullivan has assembled a gaggle of CBS ushers to talk about tomorrow night’s show, featuring the four lads from Liverpool who call themselves the Beetles—strike that, the Beatles. He needs to...

Feb 20, 2019 — An overview of the award winners and a few critical and personal favorites.

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Nov 26, 2018 — The legendary filmmaker possessed the greatest speaking voice in American cinema, and The Magnificent Ambersons represents the summit of his work as a vocal actor.