True Crime

Jul 11, 1988 — Cinema has given us any number of tales of the criminal underworld, and explorations of the mindsets of murderers—yet there’s been nothing quite like Shohei Imamura’s searing work.

Oct 4, 2023 — Night has fallen in London, but the streets still teem with people. Through a second-story window, we watch as an elderly Jewish man who lives over a shop is stabbed to death and his rooms are set on fire. We...

Sep 18, 2000 — Drenched in mud and rain, Lars von Trier’s breakthrough film inhabits a true twilight zone, bereft of heroes and integrity.

Apr 2, 2021 — More mysteries from Rian Johnson plus notes on forthcoming films from Steven Spielberg, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Alma Har’el, and more.

Dec 14, 2023 — Greta Gerwig will preside over the jury in Cannes, Sundance will celebrate forty years, and the Berlinale names a new director.

Jul 9, 2017 — A veteran of Japan’s legendary Shochiku studios, the versatile genre auteur Yoshitaro Nomura made his mark with a string of impeccably constructed thrillers. Five of his best are now available to stream on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.

Aug 22, 2017 — French cinema titan Sacha Guitry brings a savage misanthropy to this exploration of a toxic marriage and the arbitrariness of the legal system.

Dec 13, 2011 — Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.

Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...

Jun 11, 2019 — The problem with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies, everyone agrees, is that there is never enough dancing. You have to wait through often silly plots and hit-or-miss comedy for the musical numbers that are the whole point. But the dances...