The Criterion Collection
Oct 29, 2019 — Matewan opens in the pitch-black darkness of a West Virginia coal mine. A miner lights the carbide lamp on his helmet. The small open flame he wears provides the only flicker of light in this cramped space next to a...
Aug 30, 2019 — In 1933, Japan withdrew from the League of Nations, after being censured for its invasion of Manchuria. Despite this, the majority of Japanese people remained avid consumers of American movies and Western fashion, which exasperated the militarists in power. A...
Jun 24, 2019 — A work of rapturous energy, John Cameron Mitchell’s beloved debut feature is a freewheeling rock-and-roll musical suffused with heartbreak and pleasure.
Interviews
May 29, 2019 — In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building...
May 7, 2019 — “The emotion and conflict between two people in a drawing room can be as exciting as a gun battle, and possibly more exciting,” wrote William Wyler on the release of his film The Heiress in 1949. This tenet is fully borne out...
Apr 10, 2019 — One Scene Dušan Makavejev’s boundary-pushing 1974 film Sweet Movie gleefully skewers the forces of social oppression with a twisted double narrative and Day-Glo scenarios. At a time when the director’s native Yugoslavia was carving out a unique position somewhere between the political...
May 14, 2018 — In the singular world of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki, auteurist homage and social consciousness are joined by some of the most lovingly filmed dogs in contemporary cinema.
The Daily
Apr 16, 2018 — Following lineup announcements from the Cannes Film Festival and Critics’ Week, the Quinzaine des Réalisateurs, or Directors’s Fortnight has presented the slate for its fiftieth edition, running from May 9 through 19. “As per the tradition of the parallel section,”...
The Daily
Apr 12, 2018 — Perhaps the most exciting “in the works” item of the past few days isn’t even about a film. Elaine May, seen above with her comedy partner Mike Nichols in the 1950s, “will star in the first Broadway production of Kenneth...
The Daily
Mar 2, 2018 — “This was a singular experience,” writes novelist Walter Mosley, who’s revisited Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) and turns in a powerful piece in the Hollywood Reporter. On the one hand, the “belief in the North as...