Life Is Beautiful

Dec 6, 2022 — Known for their austerity and shocking moments of violence, the Austrian director’s first three films cultivate a kind of humanism in their dogged refusal to coddle the viewer.

Jun 22, 2022 — The long, quietly tense opening minutes of L’eclisse offer a blueprint for filmmakers looking to craft a devastating breakup scene.

Jun 21, 2022 — Two eras of Hong Kong history collide in this exquisite ghost story, which solidified director Stanley Kwan’s status as one of cinema’s truest romantics.

May 26, 2022 — Shimmy into summer with our centennial tribute to Judy Garland and two career-spanning series dedicated to queer filmmakers Ulrike Ottinger and Terence Davies.

Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...

Oct 19, 2021 — The works of great artists have a way of reactivating fundamental questions about the nature and potential of an art form. In the case of filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, these questions revolve around a word that has been used routinely to...

Sep 30, 2021 — The Oscar-winning actor—whose one-hundredth birthday we’re celebrating on the Criterion Channel—embodied a mess of contradictions that have long been obscured by her reputation for unbending rectitude.

Dec 16, 2020 — Edgar Wright, Sion Sono, Nanfu Wang, Robin Wright, and Ben Wheatley are among the filmmakers premiering new work next month.

Dec 3, 2020 — First Person A dedicated movie buff from my teenage years onward, and an assiduous if not pedantic completist forever seeking out obscure backlist items by favorite auteurs, such as that rare screening of George Cukor’s The Model and the Marriage...

Sep 14, 2020 — Golden Lion for Chloé Zhao! Plus a look at what the critics have to say about all the award winners.