Love and Crime

Jun 14, 2019 — On the late Peter Whitehead, Jordan Peele’s Us, drag culture, European refugees, and images of incarceration

Apr 17, 2018 — “Almost every Steven Spielberg movie has its antecedent in a TV show, a movie serial or a comic book,” wrote Michael Sragow when he spoke with Spielberg for Rolling Stone in 1981. “The one he feels [Raiders of the Lost...

Aug 12, 2017 — At Shadowplay, David Cairns has posted David Melville Wingrove’s tribute to Conchita Montenegro, whose career in theater and film took her around the world from the late 1920s through the mid-40s. Her “triumphant final film” would be the 1944 Spanish...

Dec 18, 2016 — Imogen Sara Smith examines the tensions between tradition and modernity reflected in two silent crime films by Yasujiro Ozu and Tomu Uchida.

Jun 28, 2022 — Boasting a larger-than-life Divine, John Waters’ underground classic finds the sublime in the ridiculous.

May 26, 2022 — The top awards at this year’s Critics’ Week go to stories of young people with uncertain futures.

Oct 12, 2021 — In Raoul Walsh’s elegy for the Depression-era archetype of the noble outlaw, Humphrey Bogart plays an old-fashioned desperado who has outlived his time.

Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...

Jan 29, 2018 — In the latest episode of Observations on Film Art, now playing on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, professor Jeff Smith discusses Robert Altman’s playful experimentation with genre in his 1992 film The Player.

May 21, 2017 — We begin with Leslie Felperin in the Hollywood Reporter: “A debut feature from Lea Mysius, who only graduated from Paris’ La Femis film school a few years ago, Ava is a sensual, accomplished but awkward study of teen female sexuality,...