The Criterion Collection
Jul 28, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s first full-fledged storybook fantasy challenges and subverts traditional fairy-tale norms.
Feb 17, 2014 — Flailing fathers, anxious mothers, and their moody offspring—these characters may have tails, but they’re Wes Anderson people through and through.
Features
Oct 26, 2010 — For several decades now, William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) and Carl Dreyer’s Gertrud (1964) have been major touchstones for me—not only separately but also in some mysterious relation to each other. I even managed to find a way of discussing these...
Essays
Jun 22, 2010 — In the autumn of 1989, the Iranian magazine Sorush printed a story about an unusual crime: a poor man had been arrested for impersonating a celebrated film director, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to a middle-class family in northern Tehran. Although the accused,...
Nov 19, 2007 — In 2003, on the occasion of the Cinémathèque française’s complete retrospective of Ingmar Bergman’s work, ten filmmakers were invited to present one of his films that had a significant effect on them. Controversial French director Catherine Breillat (Fat Girl) selected...
Aug 21, 2006 — A key Gen-X comedy about postgraduate angst, Noah Baumbach’s debut feature is an uproarious union of wit and trauma.
Essays
Apr 23, 1990 — Paying little attention to civilized rules of cinema, and with a bit more than one million dollars, Steven Soderbergh expresses all his hidden anxieties in this indie classic.
Jan 11, 1988 — In Young and Innocent (1937) Alfred Hitchcock uses all the signs in his visual vocabulary to tell one of his favorite stories: fugitive hero unjustly accused of murder. Yet this is also a story of youth and innocence triumphant—a light...
On the Channel
Jan 16, 2025 — Swoon for big-city romance with our New York Love Stories collection; celebrate Black history with stories of community, creativity, and resistance; or tango with the shady characters of Argentina’s noir thrillers.
Mar 12, 2024 — In this profoundly emotional portrait of artist Nan Goldin, director Laura Poitras explores how her subject’s creative sensibility and commitment to activism spring from the same source.