The Criterion Collection
Mar 24, 2015 — Words—they conceal and reveal so much about us, as Errol Morris’s elusive and brilliant first films attest.
Mar 27, 2013 — You can’t talk about Robert Bresson for long before his use of sound comes up. His stripped-down masterpieces are memorable for the way they engage the ear as well as the eye. A Man Escaped, out this week on Blu-ray...
Essays
Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...
In Theaters
Jun 7, 2012 — Repertory PicksA film noir series is currently casting a long shadow over the Omaha movie theater Film Streams. The upcoming week’s selections include two prime crime melodramas from the fifties, both frenetic dispatches from the height of the cold war:...
Essays
Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...
Jun 27, 2011 — Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing, the late silent film People on Sunday (1930) has...
Essays
May 3, 2011 — Ingmar Bergman’s exquisite carnal comedy turns a set of boudoir farce conventions into lyrical poetry.
Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.
Jun 16, 2010 — What seems so extraordinary to me about Mystery Train, watching it again twenty years after its deadpan arrival, is not just how fresh and vivid—how utterly timeless—it remains but the extent to which it truly embraces both the myth and...
Short Takes
Dec 21, 2009 — It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Robin Wood, a true lion of film criticism and a dear friend. How does one begin to describe the impact this writer and thinker had on his field? For...