The Criterion Collection
May 14, 2019 — It all comes down to that first wink. About half an hour through Michael Haneke’s 1997 cause célèbre Funny Games, Paul (Arno Frisch), one of the two politely psychotic young home invaders who’ve taken a family captive, leads one of his...
May 13, 2019 — One Scene The Piano Teacher is one of my favorite films, and a rare novelistic adaptation that doesn’t suffer from comparison with its source material. This is especially impressive given how good a source it has: Elfriede Jelinek’s 1983 novel...
The Daily
May 10, 2019 — The latest updates from Cannes, the Berlinale, Il Cinema Ritrovato, and beyond.
May 10, 2019 — The Heiress, one of the most intense psychological dramas to issue from 1940s Hollywood, unfolds almost entirely under one roof: that of the well-appointed Manhattan town house where tremulous Catherine Sloper (an Oscar-winning Olivia de Havilland) lives with her domineering...
Criterion Designs
May 9, 2019 — Studio Visits You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more passionate about movie posters, not to mention gifted at making them, than Nashville-based artist and musician Sam Smith. A lifelong cinephile and devotee of design history—today he even cohosts a podcast...
The Daily
May 8, 2019 — New restorations premiering in Cannes and Karlovy Vary and series in New York and London testify to our ongoing fascination.
May 8, 2019 — Songbook “The very first time I saw a picture of [Charles Starkweather], I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outrider of what America might...
The Daily
May 7, 2019 — Humming light sabers weren’t the only thing going on during the maligned decade.
May 7, 2019 — “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949. This tenet is fully borne out...
Sneak Peeks
May 6, 2019 — With Police Story (1985) and Police Story 2 (1988), two anarchic, awe-inspiring action-comedies he directed, stunt-choreographed, and starred in, Jackie Chan bulldozed his way to movie immortality. The films’ intrepid, inventive stunt work might be what most catches the eye...