The Work

Mar 22, 2019 — This week spotlights George Cukor, Chantal Akerman, Straub-Huillet, Antonioni, and the feud between Clint Eastwood and Pauline Kael.

Nov 29, 2018 — First Reformed, Eighth Grade, Roma, and The Rider emerge as early favorites.

May 24, 2018 — In the 1940s, legendary British filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger took the eye-popping, beautifully saturated palette of Technicolor to delirious new heights. For this month’s episode of Observations on Film Art, now playing on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, scholar Kristin Thompson explores...

Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.

Nov 21, 2012 — In his films as well as his poems, novels, and short stories, Pier Paolo Pasolini evinced a love of vernacular speech, often choosing to write in the slangy argots of the working class and the dispossessed. He made his adaptation...

Nov 13, 2012 — With this frenetic cinematic fresco, Pasolini began his Trilogy of Life and its forays into a world as yet unspoiled by capitalism.

May 24, 2011 — In 1938, Charles Chaplin deposited with the Library of Congress a script for a film to be called The Dictator, and told the press it was a project in which he would play a double role. He clearly had Hitler...

Nov 24, 2009 — For twenty years, the remains of television’s self-proclaimed golden age lay dormant in the vaults of the commercial networks. I remember traveling, as a young researcher for NBC, to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the old shows of the fifties...

Mar 30, 2009 — Among the great Polish filmmakers—Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland, Roman Polanski—Andrzej Wajda stands out as the one most concerned with national identity and memory.

Dec 4, 2006 — A companion piece to Grey Gardens, this documentary stands on its own as a portrait of two women creatively passing the time as Rome burns.