Nature

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 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...

May 2, 2019 — When I first saw My Brilliant Career, when it was released in New York in 1980, I was ignorant of director “Gill” Armstrong. I assumed she was a man, because at the time I could count the female directors I...

Apr 26, 2019 — A politically engaged actor who refused to be commodified, this French icon showcased her piercing intelligence throughout four decades of unforgettable performances.

Apr 23, 2019 — It’s unlikely that anyone who pays attention to contemporary short films will be unfamiliar with our selection this week on the Criterion Channel, which took the film-festival circuit by storm last year, garnering dozens of awards and an Oscar nomination....

Apr 23, 2019 — Elia Kazan can be and has been called many things: a cinematic genius, an actor’s director, a womanizer, a government stoolie, an uncompromising artist and three-time Academy Award winner. But whatever your opinion of his personality, his temperament, or his...

Apr 5, 2019 — Two-Lane Blacktop A longtime Criterion contributor, Kent Jones has written for us on everything from the glories of studio filmmaking to the most daring and cerebral of art-house auteurs. But regardless of the subject he’s set his sights on, he’s...

Apr 3, 2019 — This month’s round features Dalí’s Marx Brothers movie, Bergman family drama, Welles’s unpublished play, and more.

Apr 2, 2019 — Mike Leigh’s endless fascination with human behavior is palpable in every one of the films he’s made over the course of his nearly fifty-year career. With an acute sensitivity to rhythm, character, and setting, he extracts extraordinary moments from the...

Mar 29, 2019 — When Carlos Reygadas’s debut film, Japón, came out in 2002, my generation was just starting to drive cars, smoke weed, use contraceptives. A movie ticket at the Cineteca Nacional still cost only twenty pesos then if you showed your student...