The Influence

Nov 7, 2017 — “Many aspects of time, from the dry precision of date and hour to the flights of remembrance and regret, are distilled in a single scene from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943),” writes...

Aug 11, 2017 — With his controversial new film Nocturama opening in theaters, French director Bertrand Bonello spoke with us about what inspires him as an artist and how he blurs the line between realism and abstraction.

Jul 10, 2017 — “While many of my more memorable screenings involved companions and cohorts—seeing Barbarella on a second date with the woman I’d eventually marry; catching a revival of Andrei Rublev with a friend as an elderly Russian lady noisily ate stinky borscht...

May 21, 2017 — Tonight, Sunday, May 21, 2017, Twin Peaks returns, just as Laura Palmer (may have) predicted it would twenty-five years ago, give or take. Eighteen one-hour episodes, all directed by David Lynch and cowritten with the show’s original co-creator, Mark Frost....

Nov 29, 2016 — Anahita Ghazvinizadeh’s short film Needle, which won the 2013 Cinefondation prize at Cannes, premieres today on the Criterion Channel as part of our weekly Short + Feature. I first met Anahita through programming the short at the Chicago International Film...

Jul 6, 2016 — Yesterday, we released Arthur Hiller’s uproarious 1979 comedy classic The In-Laws. Starring Alan Arkin as a pragmatic dentist and Peter Falk as a wild mystery man, Hiller’s film showcases the tremendous comedic talents of its two incredible stars. As a...

Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.

Oct 13, 2015 — Wim Wenders talks about his love of photography and people.

Mar 19, 2013 — A distinctive trait of the films of Terrence Malick is the artful way they employ narration. Sometimes the voice-over is dreamy (Sissy Spacek’s in Badlands), sometimes it’s disarmingly concrete (Linda Manz’s in Days of Heaven), sometimes it comprises audacious, poetic...

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...