With the start of a new year comes the restless, romantic wish to be reborn. In these portraits of dreamers, outsiders, and risk-takers, characters yearning for renewal seek reinvention through everything from the promise of new love (SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE) to taboo-breaking social and sexual expl...

In the 1990s, the twenty-year cultural cycle—in which each generation rediscovers and reinterprets the youth culture of the last—saw Gen X filmmakers turn to the 1970s for inspiration. But with more in mind than mere nostalgia, directors like Richard Linklater, Sofia Coppola, Spike Lee, and Paul ...

The dark cloud of disillusionment that spread across international screens in the wake of World War II didn’t spare the land of the midnight sun, as evidenced by this selection of stylishly shadowy, ripe-for-discovery crime dramas from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Precursors to the Scandinavian c...

One of the most thoughtful and quietly compelling actors working today, Ben Whishaw—currently nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award for his lead performance in PETER HUJAR’S DAY—projects a soulful sensitivity and soft-spoken intensity in his emotionally layered portrayals of dreamers, mis...

Growing up in New York City as the son of two writers, director Noah Baumbach had a unique exposure to a wide range of cinema—from classic swashbucklers to French New Wave masterpieces—from an early age. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, the Jay Kelly director sits down with Criterion ...

Though his piercing blue eyes and tousled hair made him a defining sex symbol of swinging-sixties Britain, Terence Stamp was more than just a pretty face—he was a transfixing screen presence who brought an unmatched elegance, restraint, and existential gravity to works by some of the defining dir...

The formally adventurous and psychologically intricate films of ever-fascinating Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan unfold according to complex, time-scrambling structures that heighten their searing emotional impact. Exploring issues of identity (including his own Armenian heritage), loss, alienation, ...

The undisputed kings of kinetic, adrenaline-rush cinema that unfolds at the heart-stopping pace of a New York minute, Josh and Benny Safdie have been keeping audiences on the edge of their seats (and on the verge of a panic attack) for over a decade with whirlwind character studies like UNCUT GEM...

Boasting one of the most compelling and adventurous filmographies of any actor working in Hollywood today, Julianne Moore has made consistently bold choices in a career that has moved easily between blockbuster hits and art-house passion projects. Working with auteurs like Todd Haynes, David Cron...

Check in and stay a while in some of cinema’s most iconic hotels, where souls in transit meet, identities shift, and the by turns liberating and lonely experience of being far from home heightens every interaction. From the gilded art deco glamour of GRAND HOTEL to the haunted corridors of THE SH...

With six features—including his acclaimed latest, SENTIMENTAL VALUE—to his name, Norwegian auteur Joachim Trier has established himself as one of the most virtuosic directors working today, a humanist who brings novelistic depth and insight to his intimate portraits of people grappling with every...

In 1990s Shanghai, fortunes are waiting to be made—but not everyone can be a winner. In his first-ever television series, legendary director Wong Kar Wai (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE) orchestrates a sprawling cast of stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, restaurateurs, bureaucrats, schemers, and dreamers riding ...

Among the most agonizingly intense films in the history of film noir are those that adopt the point of view of characters tormented by amnesia, memory holes, and drunken blackouts, leaving them to grasp in the dark in search of an often terrifying truth. Waking up unexpectedly in a stranger’s bed...