The Spacewalker

Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as  Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...

Jul 11, 2012 — Performances Of all the stultified suburban folks in The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s diamond-sharp adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel about two Connecticut families in the early seventies, Sigourney Weaver’s Janey Carver might appear the least in need of attention. Most...

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

Jun 12, 2012 — Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush isn’t notable just for its timeless gags; it’s also a superbly designed film with impressive sets and special effects. For a supplemental feature in our new edition of the film, we interviewed effects specialist Craig...

Jun 11, 2012 — Charlie Chaplin’s transcendent, visionary comedy is made up of one iconic moment after another.

Jun 8, 2012 — Has there ever been a more pliable villain than the title character in The Blob? The sticky star of Pennsylvania minister–turned–movie director Irvin S. Yeaworth’s 1958 cult classic—one of the titles highlighted in this week’s festival of free Criterion films on Hulu, all...

Jun 6, 2012 — A killer breakfast

May 17, 2012 — Repertory Picks It’s just a Wes kind of week. To coincide with next week’s U.S. opening of his Moonrise Kingdom, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York is launching a complete retrospective of Wes Anderson’s feature films, called...

May 17, 2012 — The latest comedy by Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom, had its world premiere yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival, and was very warmly received. We hope Anderson is having better luck communicating with French interviewers than he did when he and...

May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...