Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

May 21, 2025 — The exiled American director of Try and Get Me! and Hell Drivers depicted crime and violence as the inevitable results of capitalist competition.

Aug 3, 2021 — With two short films and his acclaimed debut feature, No Data Plan, now playing on the Criterion Channel, the Filipino American filmmaker discusses his vision of the immigrant experience.

Whether satire or slapstick, eliciting giggles or guffaws, a vast array of farcical flicker shows await you. It's enough to make even the sourest cinephile smile.

Dec 26, 2016 — PerformancesTraveling through the subterranean portals of Videodrome like an introverted wraith, Deborah Harry carries herself with the wry, burned-out, but still titillated instincts of a voyager buying a one-way ticket for the outer limits. A vivid, smallish part can either...

Jul 21, 2026 — At the beginning of Cruel Story of Youth (1960), the title splashes across the screen in fiery red. Each of the three Japanese words that appear offers a key to understanding director Nagisa Oshima’s breakthrough film and the energies that...

Mar 31, 2025 — Steeped in theater history, Shinoda infused centuries-old tales with twentieth-century dynamism.

Oct 15, 2024 — This jolt of delicious weirdness from Japanese New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda is both a reverent salute to Kabuki and a self-consciously postmodern take on its traditions.

Aug 11, 2023 — Great as they are, there was a lot more to Hurricane Billy than The French Connection and The Exorcist.

May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...