Emotion

Dec 6, 1987 — Mike Nichols’s treatment of a young man’s initiation into the mysteries of sex at the hands of an older married woman has become a model for this common fantasy.

Oct 12, 1987 — For more than forty years, The Seventh Seal has been a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged. It launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor,...

Dec 1, 1986 — Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is one cult film that has also won over the cultivated buff. As Peter Morris remarks (in his Dictionary of Films): “Though one of the subtlest films of the genre, containing little...

Mar 11, 2016 — Valley of Love (2015), dir. Guillaume Nicloux “Filmmaking is a collective assemblage of desires,” said Isabelle Huppert when we sat down to talk on a recent morning. We were speaking about how she picks her roles, and how her own intuition...

Apr 16, 2014 — Breaking the Waves is the kind of film that elicits strong emotional responses. And as its director Lars von Trier, editor Anders Refn, and location scout Anthony Dod Mantle discuss in this excerpt from our new edition’s scene-specific audio commentary,...

Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...

Apr 24, 2025 — Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) began his music career in 2008 and released his debut album, Learning, in 2010 through his longtime label home, Matador Records. The album immediately drew critics’ attention to Hadreas’s ability to convey emotional vulnerability with his...

Mar 12, 2024 — In this profoundly emotional portrait of artist Nan Goldin, director Laura Poitras explores how her subject’s creative sensibility and commitment to activism spring from the same source.

Dec 13, 2022 — A departure from the tales of sex and violence that defined Black cinema in the early 1970s, Michael Schultz’s beloved coming-of-age film celebrates the emotional bonds among a group of young Black men.

Aug 31, 2020 — Documentaries lead the charge this month on the Criterion Channel, with a wide-ranging offering of nonfiction films as formally imaginative and emotionally riveting as any scripted drama.