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Peter Cowie has been a specialist in Swedish cinema since the 1960s and has provided commentaries for numerous films in the Criterion Collection. His biography of Ingmar Bergman will appear in late 2023.

Mar 6, 2020 — Above photo: © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLCIn America, black musical genius has never been in short supply, though it hasn’t always been recognized or fairly compensated. Even a casual glance at the résumé of formally trained composer, producer, and arranger...

Sep 3, 2019 — The twenty-five-year-old Marco Bellocchio certainly didn’t pull any punches with his stylish, subversive debut feature. Following a young man (Lou Castel) in the provinces who sets out to do away with his own dysfunctional family, Fists in the Pocket (1965)...

Apr 26, 2019 — In conceiving the journey of Lonesome Rhodes—the protagonist of the 1957 satire A Face in the Crowd, a southern drifter who rises to become a national TV celebrity and political power broker—director Elia Kazan and screenwriter Budd Schulberg went on...

Jun 15, 2018 — Coming up at the turn of the seventies, Philippine filmmaker Lino Brocka made a name for himself directing nine studio movies—many of them melodramas and romances that proved popular with local critics and audiences—in the span of just two years....

Aug 7, 2017 — On the anniversary of his birth, we’re celebrating Hollywood renegade Nicholas Ray with complete editions of three of his masterpieces on the Criterion Channel.

Dec 9, 2016 — With a career spanning more than seven decades, Kirk Douglas has long since earned his place among the most luminous figures in Hollywood history. After cutting his teeth on the New York stage, he began his film career in the...

Nov 30, 2016 — The Lone Wolf and Cub film series has its roots in Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s manga of the same name, which was itself a major influence on Western cartooning and illustration in the 1980s. It felt only natural to...

Nov 18, 2016 — For Film Comment, Marc Walkow surveys the career of director Tomu Uchida, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Like many commercial Japanese directors of his era, Uchida has long been underappreciated in the West,...

Nov 4, 2016 — For our edition of the six-part chanbara epic Lone Wolf and Cub, we spoke with the author of the wildly popular manga series on which the films are based.