Look Back

Jan 17, 2019 — SXSW presents a program of 102 features and episodics, and the Berlinale’s competition and Special lineups are now complete.

Jan 15, 2019 — In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations—as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things. As the film begins, Alicia is on the...

Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...

Jan 4, 2019 — More than thirty years ago, a friend of Janus Films—the producer of I Was a Teenage Zombie—who knew of my interest in space exploration called me to say he had seen excerpts of a really cool film at DuArt, a lab...

Dec 29, 2018 — Polls and ballots, lists and considered reflections give shape to the year that was.

Dec 28, 2018 — Ulysses S. Jenkins’s Two-Zone Transfer By this time in December, the usual onslaught of critics’ polls and nomination lists has given movie lovers a feeling of consensus about what was unmissable over the past twelve months. We were curious about...

Dec 26, 2018 — Members of the Criterion tech team headed to India last month to teach some practical skills in moving-image conservation at the Film Preservation & Restoration Workshop.

Dec 20, 2018 — New York launches an Iranian film festival and sends its Art of the Real series to Los Angeles.

Dec 18, 2018 — Whatever your cinephilic interest—cinematography, acting, criticism—there’ll likely be a new book to take with you into the holidays.

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...