The Face You Deserve

Dec 6, 2019 — Coaxed out of retirement, the actor and singer is winning plaudits for his powerfully understated performance in The Irishman.

Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.

Jan 8, 2024 — The National Society of Film Critics and the Golden Globes have us surveying the latest round of best-of-2023 lists and overviews.

May 31, 2022 — Billy Wilder’s classic film noir is a powerful meditation on masculinity, desire, and the fantasies of white America.

Apr 29, 2022 — Channel Calendars This month on the Criterion Channel, we’re celebrating the career of one of our favorite contemporary American filmmakers—the independent, inquisitive, and ever-eclectic Richard Linklater—with a retrospective of beloved hits and lesser-known gems selected by the director himself. Take...

May 21, 2007 — Carol Reed’s masterpiece dives deep into the life and mind of screenwriter Graham Greene, one of Britain’s greatest postwar novelist.

Feb 14, 2025 — The director of Down with Love talks about his favorite romantic comedies set in the great metropolis and looks back on the making of his own foray into the genre.

May 11, 2021 — Dorothy Arzner’s deeply cynical portrait of marriage exemplifies the director’s ambivalence toward the norms dictating female behavior, wielding ironic detachment to mask one woman’s simmering inner turmoil.

Nov 12, 2019 — The Daytrippers came out in theaters in 1997, back when I was in graduate school at NYU. That was a year when you could rent videotapes everywhere—at Blockbuster, but also at a Laundromat or a bodega. There were still phone booths...

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...