The Daily | Criteria

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…

July 10, 2026·David Hudson

Being There

Did You See This? Harry Dean Stanton in Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984) The Criterion Mobile Closet is back in Los Angeles this weekend as we take part in Music from the Films of Wes Anderson, a series of three concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, all of them hosted by Bill Murray. Among the many artists slated to perform are Devo, Jackson Browne, Karen O, and Jeff Goldblum. “I was surprised how many things we did have to leave out,” Anderson tells Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times. “We could do a whole other round of this, but let’s see how it goes on this first one.”Cinephiles around the…

In the catalogStarring Harry Dean Stanton

July 8, 2026·David Hudson

Il Cinema Ritrovato at Forty

Jacqueline Vandal in Paula Delsol’s La dérive (1964) It takes a while to gather some perspective on a program of around five hundred films. While some—such as Geoff Gardner, chair of the Organizing Committee of Cinema Reborn—managed to keep daily diaries during the fortieth edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato (June 20 through 28), Bologna’s festival of restorations and rediscoveries, most have taken a few days to gather their thoughts.Ehsan Khoshbakht, one of the festival’s four directors, notes that 145,000 people attended this year, and he’s asked 170 of them to name a favorite film and a major…

July 7, 2026·David Hudson

Japan Cuts 2026

Suzu Hirose in Kei Ishikawa’s A Pale View of Hills (2025) Suzu Hirose was sixteen going on seventeen when her career took off. She’d done some modeling and appeared in a few films that didn’t make much of a splash before Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Our Little Sister premiered in competition in Cannes. Hirose played the title character, a thirteen-year-old who has cared for the dying man who fathered her and, by another mother, three half-sisters she has never met. After their father dies, these three young women take in their “new” younger sister.Kore-eda’s tenth feature went on to score four…

July 6, 2026·David Hudson

Věra Chytilová’s Tainted Horseplay

David Vávra in Věra Chytilová’s Tainted Horseplay (1988) It’s easy to imagine that Věra Chytilová and her editor, Ivana Kačírková, might have cut an inconsequential scene from Tainted Horseplay if it weren’t guaranteed to draw a laugh in 1988. A Czech bureaucrat is dully outlining a vision of the glorious socialist future at an under-attended meeting when a squealing woman races through the drab hall. Never mind why, but she’s cowering under a huge American flag she’s draped over herself. When they dreamed up this visual gag, Chytilová and her cowriter, Pavel Skapík, could not have known that…

In the catalogDaisies1966

July 2, 2026·David Hudson

Plucked from Obscurity

Did You See This? Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner (1967) Tonight in London, the Liberated Film Club welcomes the Otolith Group and Light Industry to the Close-Up Film Centre, while the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Divided Publishing present Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks (1996) followed by a conversation between director Isaac Julien and Françoise Vergès. Over the weekend, Cinema Mentiré will roll out Salome, Salome, Salome, a program of “three radically different queer incarnations of the biblical princess across Brazil, Mexico, and the UK.” André Antônio’s Salomé (2024)…

In the catalogThe Prisoner1967