May 13, 2022 — The director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair reflects on the transformative power of a Sonic Youth needle drop in Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film.

Jun 26, 2019 — After Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, the French actress starred in films by Duvivier, Buñuel, Ruiz, Rivette, Assayas, and Hansen-Løve.

Apr 9, 2013 — This review by film critic Janet Maslin originally appeared in the December 27, 1991, edition of the New York Times, and appears by permission of the author. Naked Lunch, adapted by the dauntless David Cronenberg from William S. Burroughs’s 1959...

These uncategorizable works blur the lines between fiction and documentary with panache.

May 10, 2017 — Whether evoking the pain of first love or investigating the challenges of the contemporary immigrant experience, Tunisian-French filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche depicts human behavior in all its unruly complexity. In 2007, his gift for infusing rich, classically structured narratives with documentary-like...

Jun 7, 2017 — Japanese New Wave director Masahiro Shinoda discusses how Kenji Mizoguchi seamlessly weaves together harsh realism and spellbinding fantasy in his masterpiece Ugetsu.

Sep 12, 2007 — Here’s a Criterion discussion that won’t die. It has to do with Berlin Alexanderplatz, and it came up again this week, thanks to a couple of customers writing in. We were standing there in a clump outside our production manager’s...

Oct 16, 2013 — Georges Franju deftly balances fantasy and realism, clinical detachment and operatic emotion, beauty and pain, all presided over by Edith Scob’s haunting, haunted eyes.

"Life caught unawares," that's how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov defined the principle and art of documentary in the thirties. Yet the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it is too simple to call it the...

Sep 27, 2012 — Franc Roddam, the director of Quadrophenia, got his start working for British television in the seventies, making award-winning films like Mini and Dummy and the fly-on-the-wall series The Family. His other feature films include The Lords of Discipline, The Bride,...