Features

One Scene

In one of the most overpowering moments in any concert documentary, D. A. Pennebaker immortalized soul icon Otis Redding as both palpable presence and luminescent mystery.

Working from the outside in, one of the most celebrated actors of his generation infused his majestic, deeply dramatic performances with touches of humor that illuminated his characters’ humanity.

A new web resource spearheaded by Su Friedrich celebrates women editors from around the world, highlighting work that has long been obscured by the masculinism of auteurist film culture.

Performances

The late actor became an icon of his generation with this moody, brilliant non-performance, informed by his intimate knowledge of chaos and death.

With their novelistic density and sexual openness, the films of French master André Téchiné introduced director Stephen Cone to a strange new world of contradictions.

Dark Passages

Three noirs from 1949 plough up the dark underbelly of agriculture, exploring the corrupt system that puts food on our tables.

The late D. A. Pennebaker once dreamed of being a jazz musician, but he instead found his instrument in a news camera that allowed him to change documentary filmmaking forever.

In the string of early-career triumphs that established him as the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock captured his native England with a tactile immediacy.

One Scene

The trashy contrivances of Magnificent Obsession give way to brilliant, high-art mise-en-scène in a memorable scene that plays with the theme of lost vision.

During two recent trips to Stockholm, one of the world’s foremost Bergman specialists took a dive into a wealth of archival material that raises fresh questions about the Swedish master.

Bologna’s annual celebration of classic movies is a site of endless discovery, inspiring new ways of thinking about our nostalgia for cinema’s past.

The subject of a career retrospective on the Criterion Channel, this risk-taking, death-defying visionary of the New German Cinema makes movies that are forces of nature.

This year’s San Francisco Silent Film Festival was haunted by the shadows of lost films, abandoned formats, and fascinating ephemera.

One Scene

The director of Midsommar finds the joy of collaboration and creation in Mike Leigh’s period epic.

The director of Angela and The Ballad of Jack and Rose revisits the themes of personal crisis and transformation that drive her early films, now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Rejecting the repression of Franco-era Spain, Pedro Almodóvar made his name with exuberant films set in an eternal present. But by the turn of the century, his cinema began to drift toward memories of a not so distant past.

Over the course of her five-decade career, one of cinema’s greatest globe-trotters brought her musical, richly expressive voice to an impressive array of cultural contexts.

Agnieszka Holland challenges romantic notions of civil unrest and revolutionary activism in her magnificently bleak period miniseries Burning Bush, which is now available to stream on the Criterion Channel.

The foremost chronicler of punk made films that captured the messy contradictions and sheer rage at the heart of the phenomenon.

Flashbacks

Boasting the longest, most versatile career of any Czechoslovak New Waver, the late master made films mixed with deep compassion and an antiauthoritarian spirit.

Performances

The Cannes-award-winning lead performance in Lee Chang-dong’s masterful melodrama captures both the pain and perverse pleasure of public crying.

One Scene

The director of the Sundance hit The Last Black Man in San Francisco reflects on what he learned from Ken Russell’s extravagant style and approach to the subject of male relationships.

Alec Guinness carved out a place among the greatest of British actors by mixing his demure persona with dry wit and a taste for the absurd.

With the help of MGM’s most ingenious photographers, screen goddesses like Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford made the still portrait a key part of their artistry.