Sep 24, 2014 — Roman Polanski’s dark vision is the perfect fit for Shakespeare’s grim tale of treachery and ambition.

Jan 5, 2006 — A gray flannel ghost story in which the living haunt the dead, the least appreciated of Akira Kurosawa’s midperiod collaborations with Toshiro Mifune throws open the windows of Japanese corporate corruption.

Jan 19, 2017 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.

Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...

Feb 14, 2018 — With her acclaimed new film Western opening in theaters this week, we spoke with German director Valeska Grisebach on the romantic ideals of the quintessential American genre.

May 12, 2016 — When director Amy Heckerling visited Criterion, she reflected on her days as a struggling filmmaker, the allure and disappointment of moving to the West Coast, and her love for old-Hollywood actors.

Oct 2, 2014 — The following is a chapter on The Innocents from cinematographer Freddie Francis’s memoir, The Straight Story from “Moby Dick” to “Glory.” It is reproduced here courtesy of Scarecrow Press. The last picture I worked on as a cinematographer in my...

Apr 1, 2018 — Empire has been rolling out interviews from its “Spielberg Takeover” issue, the one with five different covers, including a podcast (102’01”) that’s naturally not part of the print version, in which contributors talk with Steven Spielberg himself and with Simon...

Jan 22, 2026 — This visually stunning masterpiece from Kazakh New Wave iconoclast Ardak Amirkulov is one of the few films that looks evil in the eye without flinching.

Sep 20, 2024 — With their virtuosic celebrations of death, giallo films reflect the air of paranoia and fear that haunted Italian society in the 1960s and ’70s, a period when the country was undergoing dramatic, violent changes.