The Making of a Man

Sep 4, 2017 — “Lebanon director Samuel Maoz went in a risky direction by making a film as different and daring as Foxtrot,” writes Jay Weissberg for Variety, “and his boldness pays off in ways that make one reach for superlatives. Not content to...

Jun 9, 2017 — “The 25 Best Films of the 21st Century. So Far.” Frankly, this time of year, my cursor tends to fly right over a headline like that, having worn itself out on such lists from Thanksgiving through Oscar Night. But this...

Jan 16, 2013 — Restoration Spotlight Criterion’s new restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much was a project many years in the making. Since the original negative is missing, the first challenge was to find the best possible source...

Jul 19, 2010 — “Why do you want to dance?” “Why do you want to live?” A question followed by another question stands at the beating heart of The Red Shoes. It’s an entirely rhetorical exchange, but it underscores the power and the mystery...

Apr 20, 2010 — In 1992, I went to Paris to see some movies that weren’t turning up on these shores, at least not as quickly as I wanted them to. At the time, it meant something particular to be going to Paris to...

Mar 30, 2010 — The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with precious few directors of his generation....

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Apr 19, 1994 — Rivaled only by Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst as Germany’s greatest director of the silent age, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a tireless formal innovator exhilaratingly difficult to pin down. If his 1922 horror epic Nosferatu represented an apex of...

Jun 23, 2026 — The only favor I ever asked of a twink was for tickets to see John Waters introduce two of his films. I was the sole trans filmmaker enrolled in my school’s program, and I felt it was my right to...

May 27, 2020 — In John Cassavetes’s Husbands, the director, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk play Gus, Harry, and Archie, three middle-aged, middle-class suburbanites who come together at the funeral of their close mutual friend Stuart, and, united in grief, commence drinking together. And...