A Gift

Jul 23, 2025 — The director of Female Perversions looks back on the film’s transgressive exploration of women’s sexuality and on Tilda Swinton’s role as a key collaborator.

May 29, 2024 — This Oscar-winning courtroom drama revolves around one of director Justine Triet’s most complex creations—a high-achieving female protagonist whose motivations remain tenaciously mysterious.

Feb 20, 2024 — I have, over time, become wary of and impatient with the word authentic, especially when it’s too casually and blithely deployed, as it often is these days, to defame or diminish someone or something based on arbitrary standards of what...

May 21, 2021 — Known for her resilient heroines, the prolific Japanese actor finds agency through moments of hesitation in one of her seventeen collaborations with Mikio Naruse.

Apr 9, 2020 — The American Cinematheque premieres a delightful five-minute film that Varda made in 2008.

Apr 12, 2019 — This week sees further remembrances of Agnès Varda, reflections on Godard then and now, and appreciations of a vital but too often overlooked filmmaker, Nelly Kaplan.

Jan 19, 2018 — Two marvels of midcentury social commentary now streaming on the Criterion Channel show how progress can be a one-step-forward, two-steps-backward process.

Aug 16, 2016 — Stig Björkman’s candid documentary gathers a wealth of material from Ingrid Bergman’s personal archive, revealing the star as a fastidious collector of her own memories.

Mar 23, 2016 — We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.

Oct 16, 2013 — Georges Franju deftly balances fantasy and realism, clinical detachment and operatic emotion, beauty and pain, all presided over by Edith Scob’s haunting, haunted eyes.