The First Time

Mar 3, 2025 — His range was astounding, and yet every performance was immediately recognizable as uniquely his.

Feb 9, 2023 — New York’s Metrograph presents a series of films Rainer has called “autobiographical fictions, untrue confessions.”

May 10, 2019 — The latest updates from Cannes, the Berlinale, Il Cinema Ritrovato, and beyond.

Sep 10, 2018 — One of the pleasures of programming a new short-and-feature pairing every week on the Criterion Channel is getting to celebrate the artistic freedom that short films offer emerging artists. With tighter run times and smaller budgets, the form comes with...

Oct 31, 2017 — New York. “Cinema began less as an art, more as a curiosity,” writes Tyler Maxin at Screen Slate. “Its early practitioners were hucksters, charlatans, and illusionists, and its direct predecessors were phantasmagoria, magic lanterns, vaudeville, and sideshows.” Tonight at Light...

Jul 12, 2017 — New York. A retrospective of films by Alain Tanner opens today at the Metrograph and runs through July 23. Writing for Hyperallergic, Craig Hubert looks back on work Tanner did with the late critic, novelist, painter, and poet John Berger,...

May 18, 2016 — In 1966, Senegalese novelist-turned-director Ousmane Sembène achieved international acclaim with his debut feature-length film, Black Girl. His urgent and intimate portrait of a young woman who leaves behind the struggles of her native Dakar for an equally challenging life as...

Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...

May 31, 2009 — Apparently, things were as rough on the set of Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life as they were on-screen. In a new piece for the Guardian, written on the occasion of a theatrical rerelease of the film in the United Kingdom,...

Feb 27, 2019 — Born in Brittany, Christophe Honoré published several books for young readers in the nineties, then four novels with Les Éditions de l’Olivier. He collaborated on a number of screenplays before directing his first movie in 2002, Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard....