The Look

Dec 17, 2021 — A Nicole Brenez dossier and writing on Melvin Van Peebles and Nicolas Cage are among this week’s highlights.

Jul 30, 2021 — First: conscious neglect and budget cuts are threatening cinema’s legacy. Then: this week’s highlights.

Mar 10, 2021 — For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an...

Oct 2, 2020 — This wild week we’re celebrating William Greaves, watching Denis Lavant dance, and listening to Léonce-Henry Burel’s juicy stories about Robert Bresson.

Jul 6, 2020 — Songbook In the blue moonlight of a humid December night, an escape is underway. A man in army fatigues runs from an open-air cell with a rolled-up rug in one hand and a sword in the other, stolen from someone...

Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...

Nov 12, 2019 — The Daytrippers came out in theaters in 1997, back when I was in graduate school at NYU. That was a year when you could rent videotapes everywhere—at Blockbuster, but also at a Laundromat or a bodega. There were still phone booths...

Oct 28, 2019 — One Scene In Nadav Lapid’s latest film, the award-winning Synonyms, a young man moves from Tel Aviv to Paris to make a clean break from his Israeli identity. This drastic attempt at self-reinvention is something that Lapid himself endeavored in his...

Oct 18, 2019 — Art-House America Like a number of theaters featured in our Criterion Channel series Art-House America, the Loft Cinema once faced the threat of its doors closing permanently. Born in 1972, and originally based in a small space near the University of Arizona, this...

Dec 10, 2018 — Alfonso Cuarón’s latest scores best film awards from critics’ groups in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Toronto.