The Complex

Dec 12, 2019 — The National Film Registry adds twenty-five titles, Film Comment lists the best films of 2019, and Vulture critics rank 5,279 movies made in the 2010s.

Nov 11, 2019 — This month we’re reading about the women (and men) of Hollywood, weighing arguments from all corners, and picking up an overlooked novel.

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 24, 2019 — Festivals across the continent celebrate the eclectic oeuvre of the renowned Egyptian filmmaker.

Feb 4, 2019 — All four of this year’s top prizewinners have been directed or codirected by women.

Dec 4, 2017 — In a new video on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, legendary documentarian Marcel Ophuls discusses his approach to capturing the revealing interviews at the heart of his films.

May 31, 2017 — Long difficult to see, this transgressive silent masterpiece draws on a wide range of aesthetic influences to push against the boundaries of film form.

Oct 11, 2011 — A. E. W. Mason’s sweeping action novel The Four Feathers (1902) had already inspired three films by the time producer Alexander Korda got to it in 1939. It would be filmed three more times afterward. But you really haven’t seen it...

Feb 1, 2011 — This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the 2006 DVD release of The Double Life of Véronique. A new life experience is in the air today, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders...

May 5, 2009 — Irecently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given...