To Die For: You’re Not Anybody in America Unless You’re on TV
In Gus Van Sant’s wickedly funny tale of suburban depravity, Nicole Kidman plays a vacuous weather reporter whose hunger for fame anticipates our own era of digital celebrity.
Three Routes Through Thelma & Louise
How the West Was Won
Seamlessly blending an array of cinematic traditions, Thelma & Louise is more than anything a western—one that takes advantage of the genre’s elasticity and reflects its preoccupation with justice, liberty, and self-determination.
From Her to Eternity: The Enduring Icy Hotness of Deborah Kerr
The Oscar-winning actor—whose one-hundredth birthday we’re celebrating on the Criterion Channel—embodied a mess of contradictions that have long been obscured by her reputation for unbending rectitude.
La piscine: Savage Water
Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.
Crash: The Wreck of the Century
In one of the most controversial films of his career, David Cronenberg adapts a scandalous J. G. Ballard novel, radically overhauling its story to address a society paralyzed in the headlights of a new millennium.