Three for One

Mar 7, 2022 — Maggie Gyllenhaal’s first feature as a writer and director wins three top prizes—and praise from novelist Elena Ferrante

Feb 15, 2022 — Films from Italy, Iceland, and the Central African Republic each map the dynamic between four friends.

Oct 13, 2021 — 1. In spite of Melvin Van Peebles’s well-earned reputation for being a provocateur and a disrupter, he was also known for his kindness and generosity toward others. Over the course of working on the Essential Films box set, I observed...

Sep 30, 2021 — The Oscar-winning actor—whose one-hundredth birthday we’re celebrating on the Criterion Channel—embodied a mess of contradictions that have long been obscured by her reputation for unbending rectitude.

Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films Come on now, honey sugarYou know your baby loveYou know just the other dayI was gonna take you to go see a movieSweet Sweetback . . . Stevie Wonder, “Sweet Little Girl,” 1972 We went...

Aug 17, 2021 — This month we’re reading about Hollywood memoirs, cultural histories, and the revived debate over the screenplay for Last Year at Marienbad.

Feb 16, 2021 — Reviews are strong for the biography of the unique theater and film director, comedian and actor.

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Oct 7, 2019 — One Scene Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike has directed more than a hundred features, and almost three decades into his career he’s showing no signs of slowing down. Throughout his ferocious, often controversial body of work, he has contorted disparate genres...

Sep 5, 2019 — Critics split three ways: Joker is just plain great, or great but dangerous, or dangerous and also really quite bad.