The Theme

Sep 29, 2021 — It’s National Silent Movie Day—and the Pordenone Silent Film Festival opens on Saturday.

Sep 28, 2021 — The first Black-directed movie musical of the modern film era, Melvin Van Peebles’s drama illuminates the cultural and political concerns of working-class Black people with delight and fancy.

Dec 10, 2020 — Twenty-four features from around the world offer a remedy for cabin fever.

Aug 30, 2019 — Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy is a true marvel of narrative construction: the neorealist-like odyssey of Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987) gives way to the slippery intermingling of fact and fiction in And Life Goes On (1992), a road movie...

Jun 28, 2019 — This week’s highlights include an oral history of one of Kubrick’s most challenging sequences and reviews of the latest works from Béla Tarr and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Oct 12, 2018 — Two early works by Ingmar Bergman show the Swedish master grappling with the conventions of melodrama, which would go on to influence his later explorations of spiritual torment.

Dec 17, 2017 — Norwegian director Joachim Trier talks about how Louis Malle’s 1963 masterpiece The Fire Within inspired his sophomore feature Oslo, August 31st.

Dec 12, 2017 — “Evil is ascendant,” begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “The Resistance—an intrepid, multi-everything group whose leaders include a battle-tested woman warrior—has been fighting the good fight for years but is outnumbered and occasionally outmaneuvered. Yes, the latest Star...

Jun 26, 2017 — The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Interpreter of Maladies speaks about her deeply personal connection to Indian cinema in this Criterion Channel exclusive interview.

Feb 9, 2016 — Jan Troell’s narration of one Swedish couple’s arduous journey to America portrays the migratory quality of marriage—of “finding that you think of this person who is not you, or this place that is not the land of your birth, as...