The Criterion Collection
Dec 6, 2011 — The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the film that best exemplifies Alfred Htchcock’s often-asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Even Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, in their pioneering study of Hitchcock, for...
Essays
Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.
Essays
May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.
Essays
Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki's penultimate film for Nikkatsu is a subversively funny account of the making of a model fascist.
Features
Aug 26, 2022 — In a pivotal early scene in this baseball classic, director Ron Shelton mischievously uses two contrasting rock tunes to comment on disparate versions of masculinity.
Dec 14, 2021 — In 1968, soon after he graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Mani Kaul made an arresting short titled Forms and Designs. It observes artisans at work across the country, some swimming alone against the tide of mass...
Essays
Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...
Oct 7, 2015 — It’s night in the desert. Mike (River Phoenix), a teenage hustler given to bouts of narcolepsy, and Scott (Keanu Reeves), a slumming preppy prince, are huddled over a campfire. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The...
Essays
Jan 14, 2014 — Jules Dassin’s atmospheric, genre-defining heist thriller combines American virtuosity with French cool.
The Daily
Mar 15, 2022 — A captivatingly unclassifiable leading man in the 1980s, Hurt often returned to his first passion—the theater.