Mike Birbiglia: The Old Man and the Pool

Aug 30, 2017 — “Can there be any clearer signal of reality warping as we hurtle toward imminent apocalypse than the fact that Alexander Payne has made a life-affirming film?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Venice opener Downsizing takes the long road getting...

Jan 21, 2008 — As late as 1970, Alf Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of August Strindberg’s play was declared as inaugurating “a new cinematic language.”

Oct 19, 2021 — The works of great artists have a way of reactivating fundamental questions about the nature and potential of an art form. In the case of filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, these questions revolve around a word that has been used routinely to...

Feb 26, 2020 — Before making history last year as the first black woman director to compete at Cannes, Mati Diop had been spending the previous ten years articulating her unique vision in a series of five acclaimed short films. The praise Diop has...

Feb 20, 2015 — In time for this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, we wanted to celebrate all the incredible women who have been nominated for best actress Oscars for their roles in Criterion titles. They range from the 1930s to the 2010s, and include...

Apr 21, 2014 — A real-life prison uprising inspired this two-fisted tale directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to make many more films about men in extreme situations.

Jul 21, 2011 — Performances When people talk about Mike Leigh’s Naked, the conversation is inevitably focused on David Thewlis’s nerve-shredding, tour de force central performance as the callous drifter Johnny, who slices through life like a straight razor. Yet consider how impossible his...

Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...

Jul 4, 1994 — Mike Leigh was born in the north of England in 1943. He was trained in the theater at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and in film at the London Film School. When he arrived in London in the early...

Apr 9, 2024 — In Steven Zaillian’s eight-episode series, Andrew Scott gives us what many find to be the definitive Tom Ripley.