Ben

Apr 20, 2018 — “Although her oeuvre to date is wide-ranging,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns, Claire Denis’s “most celebrated films are those that probe, usually elliptically, the legacy of French colonial rule in Africa, as seen in Chocolat (1988), her semiautobiographical debut feature;...

May 25, 2017 — “The botched bank robbery is a well-worn genre staple, but has ever a heist gone quite so wrong to quite such electric, propulsive effect as in Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time?” asks Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Bouncing wildly...

Sep 4, 2013 — Only Ernst Lubitsch got the great comedian to be as funny on the big screen as he was on the radio.

Feb 11, 2011 — Danish cinematographer Henning Bendtsen—whose career stretched from the 1940s to 1991, with his final film, Lars von Trier’s Europa—has died at the age of eighty-five. Bendtsen is best known, perhaps, for the transcendent images he created with director Carl Theodor...

Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.

Benjamin Mercer is a senior editor at the Criterion Collection. He has written for the A.V. Club, the Village Voice, Reverse Shot, and the Henry James Review, among other publications.

The writer, director, and actor returns to the Criterion Closet, where he shares how he and cinematographer Maceo Bishop studied documentaries like The War Room when making their new film The Smashing Machine, shouts out the singular performances in Carnal...

Mike Leigh’s Meantime, Ermanno Olmi’s Il posto, and Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped top the list for the sibling duo behind Good Time and Uncut Gems.

Aug 22, 2014 — Through cinematography and editing, Bob Fosse made film pliable so that it could move to the rhythms of music and bodies in motion—so that it could dance. His 1979 masterpiece All That Jazz was his ultimate achievement in this regard....