A Matter of Life and Death

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Aug 31, 2020 — Documentaries lead the charge this month on the Criterion Channel, with a wide-ranging offering of nonfiction films as formally imaginative and emotionally riveting as any scripted drama.

Mar 8, 2024 — Though the Taiwanese director began working in commercial genres, even his earliest mainstream films contain the seeds of the inimitable style that would establish him as one of the world’s most important filmmakers.

Nov 7, 2005 — Often appearing on lists of the ten greatest films of all time, called one of the most beautiful films ever made, or the most masterful work of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu comes to us awash in superlatives. No less acclaimed has...

Jan 15, 2017 — To make the performance of a tedious, exacting, time-consuming task riveting to watch, it is only necessary for the activity to be illegal.

Sep 21, 2010 — Warrendale: Man of ActionAllan King was one of cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality, but the term documentary seems too puny to describe the intense, passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality. King’s early nonfiction features are...

Nov 24, 2025 — This month brings new collections from Melissa Anderson and A. S. Hamrah and a whole shelf of lives lived with the movies.

Sep 26, 2023 — The winner of a Special Jury Prize in Venice and a box-office hit in Poland now heads to the New York Film Festival.

Jan 10, 2023 — Alice Diop and Martin Scorsese are among the filmmakers who have selected films for this year’s Berlinale Retrospective.

Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...