The Daily | Criteria

August 18, 2026·David Hudson

Presented in VistaVision

John Wayne in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) Two years ago, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold revived a long-dormant format when they shot The Brutalist in VistaVision. A year later, One Battle After Another hit theaters and Paul Thomas Anderson became the leading evangelist for the “very deep, rich, beautiful image” that VistaVision offers. Aligning frames horizontally along a 35 mm negative nearly doubles the size of the exposed surface area, and the impressive result is a finer-grained, higher resolution.Most prints of The Brutalist and One Battle, though, are struck from VistaVision…

August 17, 2026·David Hudson

Locarno’s Leopards

Florin Șerban’s You Don’t Belong Here (2026) In the opening sequence of You Don’t Belong Here, the winner of the Golden Leopard at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, thugs on bikes descend at night on a Roma community in Reșița, the postindustrial city in western Romania where director Florin Șerban was born. Tires are slashed, windshields are shattered, and as lights along the roused street flick on, a man runs out from his apartment to protest. He’s beaten and left for dead.You Don’t Belong Here “opens with great promise and finishes with a stupefyingly misguided coda,” writes Jay Weissberg…

August 14, 2026·David Hudson

Inner Friction

Did You See This? Anton Walbrook and Michael Powell on the set of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) As Locarno heads into its final weekend, contributors to the Moirée critics grid have sent out their first podcast from the festival, and Christopher Small, who has a piece on Jean Epstein in Pontón, has profiled Asia Argento for Pardo, Locarno’s daily magazine. Earlier this week, I ventured up to the Madonna del Sasso—a Franciscan sanctuary perched above the city—with Hugo Emmerzael to talk about Transition, Peter Badel and Chris Wright’s vital portrait of documentarian Thomas…

In the catalogThe Life and Death of Colonel Blimp1943Trainspotting1996Little Odessa1994

August 13, 2026·David Hudson

Summer in Japan

Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (1959) “Tears were warm, and girls were beautiful, like dreams,” says the unnamed narrator of Haruki Murakami’s 1998 novel Dance Dance Dance. “I liked movie theaters, the darkness and intimacy, and I liked the deep, sad summer nights.”That ineffable quality of the season is captured in Summer in Japan, a series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music programmed by Jesse Trussell. As noted in the series description, “Japanese cinema has always had a special affinity for the floating time, exuberant joy, and quiet melancholy of the summer.” The series will open with…

August 12, 2026·David Hudson

Rob Tregenza’s Fast

Madison Pankey in Rob Tregenza’s Fast (2026) “Shoot it fast and hard and beautiful like Ida Lupino shot Fast, Hard, and Beautiful.” As Rob Tregenza recalls it in his wide-ranging conversation with Nick Newman at the Film Stage, that was the advice his producer, Jean-Luc Godard, gave him as they set out to make Inside/Out (1997). Of course, that was nearly thirty years ago, so Tregenza’s slight misrecollection of the title of Lupino’s 1951 film Hard, Fast, and Beautiful is certainly understandable.The point is, Tregenza more or less set that directive aside while making Inside/Out, but as he…

August 11, 2026·David Hudson

Kyoko Kagawa Rarities

Kyoko Kagawa and So Yamamura in Mikio Naruse’s Little Peach (1958) In a career spanning seventy-five years, Kyoko Kagawa has made lasting impressions as the youngest daughter of aging parents in Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), the sister of an escaped slave in Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954), the wife of a wealthy industrialist in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963), and the love of two men’s lives in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998). These are all vital supporting performances, but with Kyoko Kagawa Rarities, programmers Joseph Eusebio and Akinaru Rokkaku are putting…

August 10, 2026·David Hudson

Intimate Epics: The Films of Patrick Wang

Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory (2018) Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud, a one-man, three-hour biopic starring Blake Draper as the nineteenth-century French poet, has been gradually building a dedicated audience and selling out screenings since its premiere at the Roxy Cinema in New York back in May. A. Rimbaud will screen at the Roxy again on August 30 and on Friday in San Diego as part of the Digital Gym retrospective Intimate Epics: The Films of Patrick Wang.“Even as Rimbaud’s life story unfolds in a straightforward chronological manner, Wang uses visual and aural elements to evoke the…

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…

In the catalogForce of Evil1948We’re All Going to the World’s Fair2022Welcome II the Terrordome1995Do the Right Thing1989

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…