The New Spirit

Aug 13, 2024 — In films that elude categorization, the Ukrainian director developed a boldly experimental aesthetic that evokes her mercurial inner dialogue and the leaps and stutters of her imagination.

Jul 1, 2022 — Both crowd-pleasing and gleefully subversive, Blake Edwards’s 1982 hit Victor/Victoria remains one of the few Hollywood musicals that explicitly depicts queer life.

May 17, 2022 — Juzo Itami’s tragicomic directorial debut has scandalous fun with the Japanese traditions governing death.

Nov 22, 2016 — I don’t do psychoanalysis, I do cinema. —Athina Rachel TsangariThis week, over on the Criterion Channel, we’re kicking off Meet the Filmmakers, an exclusive new series of encounters with directors we’re excited to champion. For each program, we’ve enlisted a...

Jul 19, 2010 — “It is the most erotic film that I have ever made,” wrote Michael Powell of Black Narcissus. “It is all done by suggestion, but eroticism is in every frame and image, from the beginning to the end.”

Apr 28, 2026 — As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw...

Nov 12, 2024 — Filled with expressionistic shadows and pungent details of life in the criminal underworld, this seminal tale of money and violence was among director Howard Hawks’s favorite of his own films.

Jul 11, 2023 — Martin Scorsese drew on the influence of Hitchcock and Kafka for this anxiety-ridden tale of one bizarre night in New York City—a movie that energized him during a tumultuous period in his career.

Feb 17, 2022 — Here’s a sampling of early critical response to this year’s winners.

Apr 19, 2021 — What lies beyond the grave? Human cultures across space and time have imagined many kinds of afterlives, from the attenuated shades of Hades to the lush paradise of the Islamic Jannah to the merger with the infinite anticipated by mystics....