The Criterion Collection
Oct 25, 2011 — It’s not a movie about how things were; it’s a movie about how things are remembered.
Essays
Oct 28, 2025 — An adaptation of a classic pulp novel by William Lindsay Gresham, Guillermo del Toro’s first foray into film noir is an intensely evocative exploration of how human impulses can give rise to monsters.
The Daily
Aug 21, 2024 — This month brings a new biography of Agnès Varda, collections from Phillip Lopate and Jonathan Rosenbaum, and some hefty coffee-table accessories.
Jun 20, 2023 — Two young San Francisco residents navigate the potential for romance and their opposing views on race in Barry Jenkins’s moving debut feature.
Essays
Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...
Oct 30, 2018 — Ridiculous on the outside but full of truth on the inside, Rob Reiner’s fairy-tale classic is a childhood touchstone for generations of movie lovers.
Essays
Oct 30, 2014 — Tati’s witty visual comedy also functioned as satire of a rapidly modernizing postwar France.
Features
Jul 19, 2012 — I want to start with my favorite story about Carole Lombard. She began her career in Hollywood in her teens and, as we know, was very attractive. She found herself hounded by the wolves of Tinseltown but came up with...
Mar 27, 2012 — The mysterious letter was signed “Joe.” David Lean’s lawyer had sent me a batch of old correspondence. Struggling with a biography of Lean, I was desperate for any leads, and this one seemed worth following up. But how does one...
Essays
Dec 9, 1990 — Michael Powell’s war thriller ranks alongside Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent as one of the two finest amalgams of suspense and propaganda to grace the big screen during the years 1939-45.