Wings of Desire

Sep 13, 2004 — The following piece by Sony Pictures Classics cofounder and copresident Michael Barker, who picked up Slacker for Orion Classics in 1991, originally appeared in the program for the 2001 Austin Film Society event Slacker: A Ten-Year Reunion. What I’ve found...

Jan 9, 2017 — The glittering surfaces of classic fairy tales often mask undercurrents of emotional torment, spiritual foreboding, and moral transgression. This week, our latest series on the Criterion Channel, Happily Ever After?, showcases the deviant forces lurking within some of cinema’s most...

Dec 10, 2015 — It's been a great seventieth-birthday year for Wim Wenders. After earning an Academy Award nomination for his 2014 documentary The Salt of the Earth, Wenders received an honorary Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. Then, following...

Apr 19, 2010 — Post-Avatar, it seems some of our favorite filmmakers have caught 3-D fever. Just in the past week, it’s been confirmed that Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog will soon be getting us to wear goggles. Scorsese’s excursion into the third...

Sep 3, 2015 — It’s hard to imagine Wim Wenders’s movies without the music featured in them, from Alice in the Cities’Can soundtrack and Chuck Berry performance to Paris, Texas’s Ry Cooder guitar score to Wings of Desire’s Nick Cave sequences. In a new...

Nov 19, 2001 — Luis Buñuel’s drama is a seductive work that exemplifies, even as it studies, the perversity of human desire.

Feb 1, 2011 — This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the 2006 DVD release of The Double Life of Véronique. A new life experience is in the air today, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders...

Apr 28, 2026 — As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw...

Aug 30, 2022 — Next month, the Criterion Channel celebrates the films of trailblazing cinematographer James Wong Howe, European acting icon Romy Schneider, and Spanish provocateur Carlos Saura.

Sep 29, 2021 — Luchino Visconti’s scandalous antifascist melodrama envisions the liquidation of desire with expressionistic panache.