Aug 28, 2012 — The boy Quadrophenia’s Jimmy was based on (or was he?) talks to us about the mod life.

Jul 23, 2024 — Unlike the string of early-1980s sex comedies that it superficially resembles, Paul Brickman’s debut feature fuses fierce social satire and dark, dreamy eroticism with unexpectedly rich and ambiguous results.

Nov 25, 2020 — A camera dollies down a hallway into the interior of a nursing home: the opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) prompts a foreboding that seeps into all that follows. The Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop classic “In the Still of...

Sep 30, 2019 — Critics are enthralled by a mobster’s three-and-a-half-hour alternative history of the mid-twentieth century.

Mar 23, 2015 — When we think of film noir, we think of shadowy city streets, often in Los Angeles or New York. But Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse, which we released last week, is one of a handful of dark-toned films made...

Mar 16, 2015 — Director and star Robert Montgomery suffuses his moody 1947 New Mexico–set noir with palpable postwar anxiety and expressive fatalism.

Nov 19, 2014 — While revisiting the films for their Criterion release, director Monte Hellman returned to shooting locations, many of which are now underwater; found and interviewed Calvin Johnson, the chief wrangler on both films; and discovered something new in a take of...

Nov 10, 2014 — Monte Hellman’s existential westerns take Beckett to the desert.

Apr 21, 2014 — A real-life prison uprising inspired this two-fisted tale directed by Don Siegel, who would go on to make many more films about men in extreme situations.

Jan 17, 2014 — The bravura centerpiece of Jules Dassin’s model heist thriller, Rififi, is the elaborately staged burglary itself—a nearly half-hour sequence without dialogue. With surgical precision, the film’s career criminals go about their business in silence—a brilliant directorial choice that leaves us...