Murder!

Jan 6, 2015 — Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into...

Dec 3, 2014 — “We were just in London, clubbing, all those things people did in the ’60s in the middle of London,” British actor Francesca Annis recalls, in an interview on the new Criterion release of Macbeth, of “crossing paths” with director Roman...

Dec 1, 2014 — Agroup of rich Italians is on a cruise off the coast of Sicily when one of their number—a moody, unhappy young woman—disappears. Murder, kidnapping, accident, suicide? Her boyfriend and her close friend search for her, but the search turns into...

Oct 16, 2014 — This past August, on the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. A short version of the conversation was...

Sep 24, 2014 — Roman Polanski’s dark vision is the perfect fit for Shakespeare’s grim tale of treachery and ambition.

Jul 25, 2014 — Erik Skjoldbjærg’s sun-drenched noir follows a detective trying to conceal his amoral actions amid unforgiving daylight.

Jul 24, 2014 — Everyday life gets a musical makeover in Jacques Demy’s tale of chance and love, a film of exquisitely sad happiness.

Apr 21, 2014 — A real-life prison uprising inspired this two-fisted tale directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to make many more films about men in extreme situations.

Mar 18, 2014 — In addition to technical brilliance and a humanist message, Akira Kurosawa’s adventure features one of the director’s strongest female characters.

Mar 4, 2014 — The great documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s new movie, made from footage he didn’t use in Shoah, provides a fascinating glipse at the way he began that monumental project.