Tribute to a Bad Man

Sep 28, 2017 — “If you’ve never seen The Last Detail, Hal Ashby’s 1973 comedy-drama about three Navy sailors on a debauched and ultimately tragic road trip, there are several reasons to rectify that,” begins Dana Stevens at Slate. “There’s a devilishly charismatic performance...

May 22, 2019 — Cannes 2019 While politics has never been a stranger to the Cannes Film Festival lineup, this year’s offerings have proven to be even more charged than usual. And one of the more lively and notable premieres on the Croisette so...

Jun 26, 2018 — John Waters’ favorite among his early works is both an assault on political correctness and a no-holds-barred expression of gay militancy.

Sep 30, 2019 — At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably...

Sep 8, 2017 — “A complex and layered work, [Jonas Mekas’s] Lost Lost Lost [1976]—especially its first hour—is among cinema’s most poignant accounts of the immigrant experience,” writes Girish Shambu. “Historically, the best immigration cinema stages, in an astonishing multitude of ways, a divided...

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...

Oct 24, 2023 — A beautiful, intense woman stands in a large, dusky room, lit only by an oil lamp, her eyes wide in concern and something not far from panic, her eyebrows tremulously registering every thought and fear that passes through her mind,...

Aug 20, 2017 — “Jerry Lewis, the brash slapstick comic who teamed with Dean Martin in the 1950s and later starred in The Nutty Professor and The Bellboy before launching the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, has died,” report Richard Natale and Carmel Dagan for Variety....

May 16, 2025 — There’s a lot going on besides Cannes: Kira Muratova, Glauber Rocha, Mikio Naruse . . .

Dec 23, 2017 — Let’s first take a quick break from 2017 and look back fifty years (as I suspect we’ll be doing a lot in 2018). For Little White Lies, Justine Smith has been rifling through various archives and has put together a...