The Daily | Criteria

August 7, 2026·David Hudson

Deep Dives

Did You See This? Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) L ocarno has opened with the presentation of its Excellence Award to Isabella Rossellini, the cover star of the first issue of the 2026 edition of Pardo, the magazine that the festival publishes each day during its annual run. For Rossellini, “the choice of a role never depends on the plot premise,” writes Benedetta Pini, “but on the quality of her connection with the director.” And Rossellini adds that “when it comes to particularly unique visions, such as those of Guy…

August 6, 2026·David Hudson

Technicolor Weekend 2026

Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Gene Kelly in Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain (1952) Rivaled perhaps only by a silvery black-and-white nitrate show, a projection from a well-preserved Technicolor print is about as vividly memorable as a theatrical viewing experience can be. Perfected early in the twentieth century, the three-strip filming method was discontinued in 1955, but as a dye-transfer printing process, Technicolor was built to last. The depth and saturation of surviving prints offer, as the Chicago Film Society puts it, a “look” that is “effectively impossible to replicate…

August 5, 2026·David Hudson

Restorations in Melbourne

Manoel de Oliveira’s Aniki-Bóbó (1942) Opening tomorrow with Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer’s Wicker—a comedic fable starring Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård that Richard Lawson, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, calls “a warming, sometimes poignant pleasure”—the seventy-fourth Melbourne International Film Festival will present more than three hundred films before wrapping on August 23. Many of these will be highlights from this year’s festival circuit making their Australian premieres, and of course, many more will be Australian films seeing their world premieres.Special…

August 4, 2026·David Hudson

TIFF Classics, Wavelengths, and Centerpiece Lineups

Sandra Wollner’s Everytime (2026) One of the hottest tickets at Cannes this year was for the world premiere of the new restoration of Ken Russell’s director’s cut of The Devils (1971). The next stop on the festival circuit before Warner Bros. Clockwork launches a theatrical run on October 16 is Toronto (September 10 through 20), where The Devils will screen as part of the TIFF Classics program.That lineup—announced today along with the selections for Toronto’s Wavelengths and Centerpiece programs—also includes the world premiere of a new restoration of Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948),…

August 3, 2026·David Hudson

Magnificent Melodramas

Lauren Bacall, Rock Hudson, and Robert Stack in Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) Douglas Sirk “has made the tenderest films I know,” wrote Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1971. “They are the films of someone who loves people and doesn’t despise them as we do.” Magnificent Melodramas: Douglas Sirk & Russell Metty, a series of six of the eleven films the director and cinematographer made together between 1952 and 1959, is currently running at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles through September 19.For too many years before Fassbinder, Andrew Sarris, and others rescued Sirk from what…

In the catalogAll That Heaven Allows1955Magnificent Obsession1954Written on the Wind1956

July 31, 2026·David Hudson

The Contemplative and the Corporal

Did You See This? Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai and the Prisoner (2026) Described by the Guardian’s Catherine Shoard as “one of the most hotly anticipated dramas of the year,” Elsinore, directed by Simon Stone (The Dig) and written by Stephen Beresford (Pride), will open the seventieth BFI London Film Festival on October 7. Andrew Scott stars as Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor best known to movie fans for his winning turns in Chariots of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982).Charleson’s Hamlet, though, is the stuff of London theater legend. He first played the melancholic Dane in the 1970s and…

In the catalogCarrie1976Ordet1955Pickpocket1959

July 30, 2026·David Hudson

July Books

Gene Tierney in John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945) As noted yesterday, Robert Kramer’s Walk the Walk (1996) will screen tomorrow and again on Monday at Anthology Film Archives in New York as part of the Film Comment Live series Hold Everything Dear: John Berger and Cinema. Two years ago, as Re:Voir was restoring and rereleasing Kramer’s films, the Viennale was presenting a retrospective, and the Austrian Film Museum had just released Starting Places: A Conversation with Robert Kramer, Clinton Krute and Michael Blair invited Erika Balsom and Benjamin Crais to take part in a discussion…

In the catalogJe tu il elle1975Sisters1973

July 29, 2026·David Hudson

John Berger and Cinema

John Berger and Tilda Swinton in The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016) When John Berger died in 2017, Sarah Cowan, writing for the Paris Review, noted that he was “best known for Ways of Seeing, the 1972 BBC series and book—perhaps the most bold, clear, and widely renowned explanation of art’s entanglement with capitalism.” He was a true polymath: after beginning his career as a painter, he went on to become a critic, novelist, and screenwriter.Film Comment coeditor Devika Girish, who has described Berger as “my lodestar,” writes that Berger was “that increasingly rare…

July 28, 2026·David Hudson

Silent Movie Week 2026

Buster Keaton in The Navigator (1924) Four decades ago, when Dave Kehr was a film critic for the Chicago Reader, he noted that D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East was “based on a florid Victorian stage melodrama about a seduced and abandoned orphan girl who seeks refuge with a farm family. Through his star, Lillian Gish, Griffith gives the story an emotional power that lifts this 1920 silent feature to the level of a folktale; it becomes something simple, strong, and timeless.”Now, as a curator in the Department of Film at the Museum of Modern Art, Kehr has selected Way Down East as the…

July 27, 2026·David Hudson

David Thomson’s Revisionist History

Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) Sixteen years ago, Sight and Sound polled fifty-one critics and writers to come up with a list of the five best books on cinema ever written in English. David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of Film, as it was known at the time, topped that short list. First published in 1975, the whopping collection of thousands of highly subjective and stylistically inventive entries on filmmakers and actors has periodically been expanded, revised, and updated. The sixth and latest edition, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, weighing in at…

July 24, 2026·David Hudson

Little Constellations

Did You See This? Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, and Elle Fanning in Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women (2016) The week has brought lineup announcements from Venice and Toronto and word from Film at Lincoln Center that this year’s New York Film Festival will close with the world premiere of Ava DuVernay’s 14th. Ten years ago, DuVernay’s 13th—a fiery documentary on the exploitation of loopholes in the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that led to the mass incarceration of Black Americans—opened the NYFF.Ratified in 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment was followed three years later by the…

July 24, 2026·David Hudson

Venice 2026 Lineups

Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love (2026) For some industry insiders, a few of the biggest surprises from Venice International Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera’s announcement of the lineup for the eighty-third edition on Thursday morning are the films he left out. Many were hoping to see Tom Cruise in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger, for example, or Brad Pitt in David Fincher’s The Adventures of Cliff Booth.Barbera tells the Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Roxborough that while Fincher’s film will simply not be ready in time for the festival’s eighty-third edition (September 2 through…

July 22, 2026·David Hudson

Toronto 2026 Takes Shape

Amanda Seyfried in Tim Blake Nelson’s The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd (2026) Launched in 1976 as the Toronto Festival of Festivals, the Toronto International Film Festival is spending this week and the first week of August rolling out lineups for nearly a dozen separate programs. We’re naturally looking forward to seeing what the programmers will select for the Wavelengths and Classics sections, for example, but the fifty-first edition—running from September 10 through 20—has already pretty well taken shape with Monday’s rollout of twenty-three Gala Presentations and forty-three Special…

July 21, 2026·David Hudson

Otar Iosseliani: Fables of Modern Life

Marina Kartsivadze and Ramaz Giorgobiani in Otar Iosseliani’s Falling Leaves (1966) When Georgian director Otar Iosseliani passed away at the end of 2023, Locarno artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro remembered him as “probably the most mysterious filmmaker of the twentieth century.” Born in Tbilisi in 1934, Iosseliani first studied music before heading to Moscow and enrolling at the famed All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), where his teachers included the renowned Soviet filmmakers Alexander Dovzhenko and Lev Kuleshov.Back home in Georgia, Iosseliani made several short films…

July 20, 2026·David Hudson

Cinema Rediscovered 2026

Thora Birch and Steve Buscemi in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001) Premiering new restorations of enduring and endearing films would be more than exciting enough, but Bristol’s Cinema Rediscovered is an annual festival that offers even more. There are cinema-themed walks through the city, improv workshops, a quiz, and this year, a free interactive BFI National Archive exhibition. Marking the festival’s tenth anniversary, founder Mark Cosgrove will open the 2026 edition on Wednesday evening with chat with Ehsan Khoshbakht, one of the codirectors of Il Cinema Ritrovato, moderated by Pamela…

July 17, 2026·David Hudson

Heroes vs. Sloppycats

Did You See This? Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Gary Oldman, and Dennis Hopper in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat (1996) Film at Lincoln Center has announced that James Gray’s Paper Tiger will open this year’s New York Film Festival on September 25. We took a first look at the enthusiastic critical response to Paper Tiger when it premiered in Cannes, and since then, Beatrice Loayza, writing for Film Comment, has called it “a tense, wacky, weepy crime drama about a Jewish family that gets inadvertently targeted by the Russian mob in 1980s New York. If that sounds like a retread for Gray—our most…

In the catalogStarring Courtney Love

July 17, 2026·David Hudson

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) Reviewing Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey in the New York Times, Manohla Dargis reminds us that Homer’s original epic poem “consists of 12,109 lines of nonlinear, nonstop talk and action featuring gods, mortals, monsters, weird doings, hospitality rituals, and oceans of blood, tears, and wine. Whatever the adaptation, the tale is so ingrained in our cultural DNA that even those who haven’t read the original—or Joseph Campbell on the hero’s journey—will be familiar with it, having seen a movie or two. It’s Luke Skywalker’s path and WALL·E’s, too.”As a…

July 16, 2026·David Hudson

Another Summer with Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer Maurice Schérer was teaching Greek and Latin literature and presiding over the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin when, in 1950, having cofounded La Gazette du cinéma, the future editor of Cahiers du cinéma took on a pseudonym: Eric Rohmer. “His mother disapproved of the cinema and preferred to think of her elder son as a moderately successful classics teacher since he had not succeeded in the university system in the way [his brother] René had,” writes Jaspreet Singh Boparai in the Lamp. “She died at the age of eighty-four in 1970, never realizing that her academic failure of a son was…

In the catalogDirected by Eric Rohmer

July 14, 2026·David Hudson

Sam Neill’s Brilliant Career

Sam Neill in Gillian Armstrong’s My Brilliant Career (1979) One of the themes running through the vast outpouring of genuine affection for Sam Neill since his passing was announced on Monday is an appreciation for his eagerness to cede the spotlight to his costars. And more often than not, those costars were women: Judy Davis in My Brilliant Career (1979), Isabelle Adjani in Possession (1981), Nicole Kidman in Dead Calm (1989), or Holly Hunter in The Piano (1993). In scene after scene, his modest yet firm grip on his own character would not only allow but encourage his partner to take…

July 13, 2026·David Hudson

Karlovy Vary 60/80 Awards

Nandar Myat Aung in Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering (2026) In 1959, Soviet authorities decided that the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, founded in 1946, would be held every other year. This would allow Moscow’s fledgling festival to take the spotlight in the alternate years—until, of course, the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s. That’s why KVIFF’s sixtieth edition, which wrapped over the weekend, was also a celebration of eighty years as one of the main annual cultural events in Central Europe.Among the many highlights of KVIFF 60/80 were the world premiere of a new…