Nov 19, 2019 — In 1989, film critic Raphaël Bassan coined the term cinéma du look. Describing a tendency in French cinema that had begun in the early eighties and would continue into the nineties, Bassan identified commonalities in the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix,...

Nov 22, 2019 — Jean-Jacques Beineix’s vibrant art-house sensation Betty Blue (1986) introduced to the world, in twenty-one-year-old Béatrice Dalle, an extraordinary new acting talent. Fully inhabiting the warmth, sexiness, and increasingly violent self-destructiveness of the title character, whose stormy love affair with an...

Jul 20, 2022 — A brutal critique of the American dream, Carl Franklin’s 1995 thriller explicitly confronts the racialized implications of classic film noir.

Mar 25, 2015 — Errol Morris’s revolutionary film boldly investigated the truth of a murder case while reimagining documentary cinema aesthetics.

Christmas is not always the most wonderful time of the year. Here is the melancholy side of the holiday.

Dec 8, 2016 — It may be the season of cheerful carols and twinkling lights, but the holidays also bring about a melancholy mood that has inspired some of the world’s greatest filmmakers. This week on the Criterion Channel at FilmStruck, our new series...

Mar 20, 2015 — Those are our three reasons. What are yours?

Dec 19, 2013 — It’s the most wonderful time of the year! But you wouldn’t know it from all of the melancholy Christmas films that have been made over the years. In this video essay, we investigate the longstanding tradition of bleak midwinters at...

Feb 7, 2023 — One of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s closest collaborators, the Polish composer suffuses the quotidian images that appear throughout Blue, White, and Red with deep poetry and sacred meaning.