This article is part of Film Comment’s Best of 2025 coverage. Read all the lists here.

Greaser’s Palace (Robert Downey Sr., 1972). Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.

Expanded time: exceptional scenes from Happyend, The Mastermind, and The Secret Agent stir the viewer out of the solipsism of ...

Drumroll, please: critics Bilge Ebiri and Amy Taubin join for a real-time countdown of the films topping our year-end critics ...

(Bruce McDonald, Canada, 2008)Early on a frigid Valentine’s morning in some desolate village within the Ontario hinterland, talk radio DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) is assailed by an unidentified ...

Classical Hollywood fetishism has found a most enchanting ambassador. Farran Smith Nehme of The Self-Styled Siren turns the articulation of cliché and convention into a sport—no surprise she’s chosen ...

After years of respecting the work of Meryl Streep, what was it that made audiences suddenly fall in love with her in The Devil Wears Prada? It’s not that we ever took her for granted—14 Oscar ...

Camera comes in low over an immense Western lake, its destination apparently a small island at the center that seems to consist of nothing but treetops. Draw nearer, then sweep over and pass the ...

When we met in Rome to talk about his films, it was the Epiphany, the last of the Christmas holidays. The 69-year-old director and his wife, Loredana, had just dragged themselves back to their hotel ...

Just about 10 years ago, Manny Farber and I were taking one last walk through a retrospective show of his paintings. He stopped to scrutinize a large board called Ingenious Zeus—vegetables, branches, ...

Will anyone read this story? (It has too many words and not enough pictures.) Does anyone read this magazine? (Every article in it wants to be a meal, not a McNugget.) Is anyone reading film criticism ...

Regardless of whether you love him, hate him, or are completely unaware of him, Tsui Hark remains the most important Chinese film director working today. He burst onto the scene as part of the ...