The Dragon Tamers

Jan 7, 2022 — Travel this weekend with Stanley Kubrick, David Bowie, Sarah Maldoror, Lana Wachowski, and Tsai Ming-liang.

Dec 18, 2020 — From Marlene Dietrich to Tsai Ming-liang, it’s a varied and wide-ranging bunch this week.

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...

Jul 11, 2025 — Jon Raymond is an author and screenwriter living in Portland. His books include The Half-Life, Livability, Rain Dragon, Freebird, Denial, and God and Sex. He has also published a collection of art writing called The Community: Writings About Art in...

Mar 22, 2024 — This week we’re revisiting two classic video essays and reading about great bio-pics, Med Hondo, and Haitian cinema.

Jan 24, 2012 — From the scary thuds and mysterious roars that accompany the no-frills titles to the bizarrely poignant final image of the monster, alone at the bottom of the ocean, Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla is all business and pure dream.

Feb 12, 2018 — In “Twin Peaks: The Return, or What Isn’t Cinema?,” a four-part essay at Reverse Shot, Nick Pinkerton first stakes out a position. Referring to one of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous pieces, he writes: “For a hundred years now it’s been...

Jan 7, 2018 — The updates to the entry on Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread are still rolling in, and one of the most recent ones links to Sheila O'Malley’s cover article for the new issue of Film Comment. “Unlike other clichéd Great Men...

Nov 7, 2017 — “Many aspects of time, from the dry precision of date and hour to the flights of remembrance and regret, are distilled in a single scene from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943),” writes...

Mar 26, 2020 — Deep Dives BOOM! Mahler (1974) begins auspiciously and iconoclastically, as befits its director, with a peaceful lakeside scene shattered by an abrupt conflagration. The combusting hut echoes Kiss Me Deadly and anticipates The Sacrifice and Lost Highway (Lynch: “I got...