Life

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.

Mar 14, 2005 — The first time I put an eye behind a camera (a 16mm Bell & Howell), it was in a lunatic asylum. The head of the institution was a great big hulk of a man with a face so ravaged by...

May 30, 2023 — What makes Thelma & Louise truly a film for women, despite the fact that it was directed by a man, are its stars, Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, who imbue their iconic performances with tender, unwavering specificity.

Sep 13, 2021 — The Los Angeles–based artist behind the covers for our editions of Amarcord and The Awful Truth discusses the evolution of her work.

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...

Sep 16, 2018 — Olivier Assayas revived the spirit of the 1970s in one of cinema’s most evocative party sequences, which serves as the centerpiece of his acclaimed 1994 film.

Feb 5, 2018 — In this excerpt from a supplement on our release of G. W. Pabst’s Kameradschaft, scholar Hermann Barth explores the painstaking work of set designer Ernő Metzner.

Dec 19, 2017 — Reese Witherspoon looks back on how she perfected the details of her performance as a high-school overachiever in Alexander Payne’s Election.

Mar 1, 2017 — The restoration teams at Warner Bros. and Criterion explain how they captured the silken texture of the nitrate print of Michael Curtiz’s classic noir melodrama.

Jan 10, 2017 — Mass culture is the subject of both celebration and critique in our latest Short + Feature, premiering today on the Criterion Channel. This week’s program highlights two French films that satirize the ubiquity of consumerism: Jean Luc Godard’s inventively free-form...