Up to You

Nov 19, 2015 — Satyajit Ray’s long-heralded cinematic achievement was influenced by European cinema but also grew out of long-standing Indian artistic tradition.

Aug 3, 2015 — On film noir’s unparalleled roster of resonant titles—Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, and Where Danger Lives, to name three—none is more emblematic or iconographically cogent than Night and the City. Juxtaposing two of noir’s essential, virtually ontological qualities,...

Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

Feb 26, 2014 — King of the Hill, about a struggling but resourceful preteen (Jesse Bradford) growing up amid the fear and poverty of the Great Depression, is director Steven Soderbergh’s only film to focus on the life of a child. In this clip...

Jun 19, 2013 — In a new supplement recorded in 2013 for the Criterion Collection, we catch up with Magda Vášáryová, who was a teenager when she played the title character in František Vlácil’s Czechoslovak New Wave landmark Marketa Lazarová. In this clip from...

Nov 14, 2012 — Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.

May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...

Apr 18, 2012 — Though his role in it was small, the Oscar-nominated actor Edward James Olmos (Stand and Deliver, Battlestar Galactica) cites Robert M. Young’s ¡Alambrista! as one of the most important films he’s ever made. This authentic rendering of the workaday lives...

Mar 21, 2012 — The famed collaboration between director Mikhail Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, which, with its distinctive combination of effective melodrama and a wild, powerful visual style, helped make Kalatozov the most successful Soviet cinematic export of his generation, in fact spanned...

Aug 15, 2011 — Celebrated as Stanley Kubrick’s first mature film and made when he was only twenty-eight years old, The Killing (1956) is remarkable for boldly announcing so many of the stylistic and thematic preoccupations that would become important constants of his cinema....