The Criterion Collection
May 26, 2016 — During the conductor and composer’s visit—a day after he’d led the New York Philharmonic in a live orchestral performance of the score to City Lights—we talked about his love for early cinema, the delicate process of restoring Chaplin’s music, and...
Mar 9, 2015 — François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.
Essays
Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...
Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...
Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.
Essays
Aug 20, 2007 — Luis Buñuel’s only work to be devoted entirely to Catholic dogma itself examines the six primary mysteries of the faith and the objections (or heresies, depending on your view) they have inspired.
Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.
Essays
Jan 29, 2026 — Jonathan Glazer’s enigmatic second feature explores the terrors of being desperate for love—and the vulnerability, loneliness, and difficulty in understanding other people that might drive this state.
Sep 24, 2025 — Jacques Audiard’s Paris-set drama about small-time hoodlum with musical ambitions crystallized his identity as an artist with a high degree of confidence and control.
Features
Mar 13, 2025 — While a film’s stars are forced to bear the responsibility of moving a narrative forward, supporting actors get to have fun providing comic relief or suggesting whole lives being lived beyond the screen.