Into the Okavango

Jun 8, 2017 — Repertory Picks Next Wednesday evening, moviegoers across the pond will have a chance to take in Terry Gilliam’s 1991 The Fisher King, the first entry in a monthly screening series at London’s historic Regent Street Cinema cosponsored by Criterion. After...

May 31, 2017 — New Taiwan Cinema master Edward Yang’s sophomore feature explores the conflict between tradition and modernity reflected in a relationship on the rocks.

May 31, 2017 — New York. The BAMcinématek series Varda in California opens today and runs through June 13. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody recommends Lions Love (. . . and Lies) (1969): “Filming this docu-fiction in Los Angeles in June, 1968, the week...

May 24, 2017 — For my top-prize pick from the 1970s, I’ve chosen a film that enjoyed great commercial success while also stirring up international controversy. Though it was one of the highest-grossing German films of the decade, Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Günter Grass’s...

Dec 19, 2016 — Over on the Criterion Channel, we’re bringing film school into your home with our monthly series Observations on Film Art. Hosted by esteemed film-studies scholars David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith, who recently collaborated on the eleventh edition of...

Dec 7, 2016 — Three decades after her concert film Home of the Brave, multimedia artist Laurie Anderson returned to the big screen with her 2015 sophomore feature, Heart of a Dog. In this visually intricate, sonically haunting nonfiction work, Anderson’s grief over the...

Sep 28, 2015 — Rarely has schizophrenia been closer to the surface of American cinema than in the transitional period of 1968–71. Hollywood had just abandoned its censorship code after nearly thirty-five years, and the behemoth studios were heaving and rattling into oblivion or...

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Jul 8, 2011 — I was scared to death about The Lady Eve. I happen to love pratfalls, but as almost everything I like, other people dislike, and vice versa, my dearest friends and severest critics constantly urged me to cut the pratfalls down...

Jan 18, 2011 — In his Life Studies poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” Robert Lowell wrote of “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,” a lean, glamorous, tense phrasing that invokes the Samuel Fuller of the early sixties—a director suddenly without...