The Criterion Collection
Essays
Sep 8, 1998 — In David Lean’s Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio “working girl” on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni,...
Sep 18, 1995 — The global problem of domestic violence destroys families and, in a broader context, locks entire societies into a pathology of pain, distrust, and self-hate. When the basic building blocks of any society—the bonds between mother, father, children—are so grossly violated,...
The performer, comedian, and author praises Hedwig and the Angry Inch as a drag-queen staple, discovers a lacerating self-portrait by Richard Pryor, and talks about the immense cultural impact of Paris Is Burning.
The stylish and thrillingly self-reflexive films of this acclaimed duo have revitalized classic Hollywood genres such as screwball comedy, noir, and horror.
The actor, known for his performances in Looking, We the Animals, and The Inspection, talks about two classics that inspired him to make movies and his love of Orson Welles’s gift for self-reinvention.
Jul 29, 2024 — Made in an era when self-consciously postmodern takes on the Bard were popular, Gus Van Sant’s melancholy road movie mines the ambiguously queer tensions in the history play Henry IV.
The Daily
Sep 28, 2018 — Elisabeth Moss steers a ’90s-era rock band towards self-immolation.
Aug 17, 2015 — François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.
Jane Schoenbrun is a nonbinary filmmaker and writer whose first narrative feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, was released earlier this year. Jane is the cocreator of the ongoing touring variety series The Eyeslicer, the director of the...
Farran Smith Nehme has written about film and film history for the New York Post, Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal, Film Comment, the Village Voice, and Sight and Sound as well as for her Substack, Self-Styled Siren.