Look Back

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...

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Nov 29, 2018 — 112 films, including new work from Joanna Hogg, Stanley Nelson, Kim Longinotto, and Ritesh Batra.

Nov 28, 2018 — The career of one of Italy’s greatest directors was riddled with scandal and accolades.