The Criterion Collection
Aug 18, 2020 — A sensuous exploration of amorous discontent and dreadful miscalculation, The Comfort of Strangers (1990) could be described as an erotic thriller, though it rarely is: its eroticism is too perverse, its pedigree too highbrow. Directed by Paul Schrader and based...
Jul 3, 2020 — As The War of the Worlds is essentially a cautionary tale, each generation gets its own adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic account of extraterrestrial invasion—one of the several seminal science-fiction novels, also including The Time Machine (1895) and The...
The Daily
Apr 29, 2020 — The actor best known for his work with Danny Boyle, Ang Lee, Asif Kapadia, and Ritesh Batra was only fifty-three.
Apr 16, 2020 — Performances If Richard Milhous Nixon, the thirty-sixth president, continues to inspire a morbid fascination in some of us, the reasons for this extend beyond the obviously exceptional aspects of his career—his reelection in 1972, one of the largest landslide victories...
The Daily
Apr 1, 2020 — Cultural institutions around the country are cutting back, but it’s the fear of losing Film Comment that has set off alarms among cinephiles.
Mar 31, 2020 — Everybody loves Show Boat, but where is the love for the woman whose name alone sits above the title in James Whale’s dazzling 1936 film version? Edna Ferber was a best-selling novelist for decades, and in her peak years also...
Oct 22, 2019 — Muhammad Ali was thirty-two years old when he arrived in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974 to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world. Thirty-two is not prohibitively old for a boxer in the heavyweight division. (As I type, the most...
The Daily
Sep 17, 2019 — Also this month: Hollywood stars writing and reading and a novel that reimagines the intertwined lives of Marlene Dietrich, Anna May Wong, and Leni Riefenstahl.
The Daily
Apr 24, 2019 — American cinema has lost one of its most visionary artists.
Interviews
Apr 15, 2019 — It’s one thing to have wild cinematic ambitions, and quite another to pursue them without a strong technical skill set and years of apprenticeship in the craft. But from the beginning of his career, the twenty-nine-year-old, mostly self-taught filmmaker Bi...