The Criterion Collection
Sep 24, 2018 — This faithful screen adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s legendary play explores a wide range of perspectives on working-class black life, and over the years has inspired reactions just as diverse.
Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.
Jan 28, 2025 — The first of eight collaborations between actor James Stewart and director Anthony Mann centers on a prize rifle that ends up being both a magical object and a cursed one, sending every man who possesses it to a doomed fate.
Aug 13, 2024 — In films that elude categorization, the Ukrainian director developed a boldly experimental aesthetic that evokes her mercurial inner dialogue and the leaps and stutters of her imagination.
The Daily
Mar 18, 2022 — Ukrainian cinema, suspense vs. dread, and the opposite of synesthesia are on our minds this week.
Essays
Jun 29, 2021 — In Dee Rees’s ambitious and lyrical debut, the inner life of a queer Black teenager and poet is summoned in all its nuances and contradictions.
The Daily
Apr 8, 2018 — Saige Walton and Nadine Boljkovac introduce the dossier “Materializing Absence” in the new issue of Screening the Past: “We start from the central premise that absence in screen media is not ‘nothing’—that absence itself is always invested with material attributes....
Short Takes
Nov 30, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating the seventy-third birthday of one of American cinema’s most lyrical and enigmatic storytellers. Over the course of more than four decades, Terrence Malick has established a distinctive aesthetic that juxtaposes the majestic beauty of nature with the...
Mar 16, 2015 — Director and star Robert Montgomery suffuses his moody 1947 New Mexico–set noir with palpable postwar anxiety and expressive fatalism.
Dec 9, 2014 — Liliana Cavani’s tale of the sadomasochistic bond between an ex-SS officer and a former concentration camp prisoner is a transgressive take on history and fascism.