The World

May 11, 2020 — This week’s round comes loaded with lists: 100 novels about cinema, fifty novelizations, and dozens of Sheila O’Malley’s favorite biographies.

Dec 6, 2019 — Among the many enduring virtues of The Story of Temple Drake—a pre-Code William Faulkner adaptation whose sensational depiction of a hopelessly fallen world, rife with sexual violence and other forms of malice, scandalized audiences upon its release in 1933—is its...

Sep 30, 2019 — At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably...

Sep 23, 2019 — Acclaimed filmmaker Rian Johnson has made a career out of retrofitting genres to his own imaginative specifications. After novel spins on the gumshoe neonoir (Brick) and the time-travel thriller (Looper), the writer-director launched into space—and won a much wider audience—with...

Jul 19, 2019 — In 1983, filmmaker Martin Bell, photographer Mary Ellen Mark, and journalist Cheryl McCall undertook to make a documentary about the lives of homeless and runaway teenagers in Seattle, expanding on the work that Mark and McCall had done for a...

Jul 12, 2019 — This week: Michael Mann, Peter Strickland, Pedro Almodóvar, Luc Moullet, and a forgotten chapter of film history.

Jul 10, 2019 — En route to the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the summer of 2006, I stopped off for some sightseeing in Prague. Having dutifully made the rounds of the city’s hopping tourist spots, I retreated to my bare-bones hotel...

Apr 13, 2019 — Every Saturday on the Criterion Channel, we’ll be presenting a beloved movie that’ll help you get your weekend started on the right foot. In the above introduction, filmed while Sofia Coppola was in the office to shoot her Adventures of...

Dec 21, 2018 — New issues of Senses of Cinema and cléo this week, but also healthy seasonal doses of anxiety and lamentation.

Aug 23, 2018 — The director of Computer Chess and Support the Girls finds in John Cassavetes a surrealist whose weirdest set pieces could make David Lynch blush.