Losing Ground

Feb 5, 2019 — Shame (1968) is one of the great neglected films from Ingmar Bergman’s midcareer creative explosion. It builds on and surpasses the two Bergman films that immediately preceded it: the avant-garde milestone Persona (1966) and the surreal shocker Hour of the...

Nov 26, 2018 — Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.

Mar 30, 2018 — This spectacular and technically ambitious Hollywood musical is a priceless window onto American pop culture’s view of itself in the 1930s.

Dec 7, 2017 — “After mining the American soul (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master) as brilliantly as any working director has in the last fifty years,” begins Robert Abele at TheWrap, “Paul Thomas Anderson moves to 1950’s England for Phantom Thread,...

Nov 7, 2017 — A haughty socialite is torn between the affections of three men in George Cukor’s blissful comedy of manners.

Sep 17, 2017 — Matteo Garrone’s gritty portrait of the Neapolitan Mafia draws on a lineage of Italian crime films dating back to Francesco Rosi’s trailblazing Salvatore Giuliano.

Jun 14, 2017 — New York’s BAMcinemaFest opens tonight with Aaron Katz’s Gemini and closes on June 24 with Alex Ross Perry’s Golden Exits. “Now celebrating its ninth year, this modest yet prestigious festival, so shrewdly curated, so reliably comprehensive a treasury of contemporary...

Mar 12, 2017 — With his new film Personal Shopper now in theaters, we’re sharing a conversation we had with the acclaimed French filmmaker during his visit to the Criterion office last October.

May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.

Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.