Something to Think About

Oct 15, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s beloved comedy provides insights into the way Hollywood formulas work on us.

Dec 3, 1990 — Over the years I have had a recurrent nightmare in which I am summoned to a large, unfamiliar building in a middle-European satellite country (Bulgaria, perhaps) to tell the idea of Annie Hall to the Bulgarian Minister of Green Lights,...

Jun 12, 2025 — The acclaimed crime writer joins a producer of the 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley to discuss the cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s shape-shifting, quintessentially American antihero.

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

Apr 14, 2016 — In honor of our disc release last week of the classic John Frankenheimer thriller The Manchurian Candidate, we sat down to talk about the film with the director’s widow, actor Evans Frankenheimer.

Mar 20, 2024 — Ryan Clarke and S*an D. Henry-Smith—two curators behind New York City’s premier Black electronic music festival—talk about the films they selected for Radical Dreams, Underground Sounds, a collection now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Jun 20, 2023 — In their first collaboration, director Joseph Losey and screenwriter Harold Pinter explore the cultural fissures in modern England by dramatizing a kind of role-play in which no role is stable or easy to define.

Jun 15, 2023 — A major star in the 1970s, she retired to serve as a Labour MP, and then returned to widespread acclaim.

Nov 9, 2022 — New York’s Metrograph presents films by Park Chan-wook, Bi Gan, Ang Lee, Johnnie To, and Michael Mann.

Apr 19, 2022 — Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist fable deploys barbed humor and surreal flourishes to depict class solidarity and human kindness in postwar Italy.