Like You Know It All

Nov 30, 2020 — Cuban cinema has no present-day champion more devoted than Luciano Castillo. As the director of the Cinemateca de Cuba, an organization formed in 1960 by the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in order to protect and promote...

Mar 26, 2020 — Deep Dives BOOM! Mahler (1974) begins auspiciously and iconoclastically, as befits its director, with a peaceful lakeside scene shattered by an abrupt conflagration. The combusting hut echoes Kiss Me Deadly and anticipates The Sacrifice and Lost Highway (Lynch: “I got...

Mar 17, 2020 — Released in, or rather let loose upon, the first year of the new millennium, Spike Lee’s febrile and ferocious media satire Bamboozled—the fifteenth feature-length “joint” of a prolific career—found its writer-director in an unflinching mode and an unforgiving mood. According...

Feb 14, 2020 — One Scene An irresolvable tension between the natural world and scripted narrative crops up throughout the work of German filmmaker Angela Schanelec, including in her latest feature, I Was at Home, But . . . Winner of the best director...

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

Nov 12, 2019 — The Daytrippers came out in theaters in 1997, back when I was in graduate school at NYU. That was a year when you could rent videotapes everywhere—at Blockbuster, but also at a Laundromat or a bodega. There were still phone booths...

Oct 4, 2019 — When I met Ann Carter in 2007 during the filming of a documentary about Hollywood producer Val Lewton, she was seventy years old, more than six decades removed from her starring role in Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People....

Sep 9, 2019 — In his thought-provoking latest book, the critic and frequent Criterion contributor traces the complex ways European filmmakers have grappled with the influences of Christianity and modernity.

Aug 6, 2019 — The groundbreaking filmmaker had a hand in inventing—and then reinventing over and again—the modern documentary.

Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...