Features

Songbook

Heard three times in Andrea Arnold’s coming-of-age drama, the R&B legend’s cover of “California Dreamin’ ” highlights the teenage heroine’s yearning for connection and escape.

Performances

Played with icy restraint, the bully at the heart of Irving Rapper’s classic woman’s picture is a prime example of how Hollywood melodramas shaped the archetype of the villainous mother.

Whether sublimated or made explicit, that longing feeling so specific to the queer experience has always existed in the movies. A new series on the Criterion Channel dives into this richly layered but long-suppressed cinematic history.

Taking the spotlight today on the Criterion Channel, the animated work of this legendary multimedia artist is fueled by a wildly surrealist imagination and idiosyncratic perspectives on the female psyche.

Dark Passages

From the squalid to the generic, cheap hotels serve as a quintessential habitat for the lonely, transitory people in crime cinema.

With megawatt performers in front of the camera and remarkable talent behind the scenes, the golden-age MGM musical became Hollywood’s most utopian expression of joy.

One Scene

The director of Synonyms reflects on the subtle physicality of Jean-Pierre Léaud and Chantal Goya during one long, meandering conversation in the French New Wave classic.

In the wake of World War II, the director transformed himself from a maker of warmhearted comedies and dramas into one of the most influential architects of the modern disaster movie.

Songbook

Hong Kong pop icon Faye Wong made her screen breakthrough in Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, a film that also features her hypnotic cover version of the Cranberries’ hit “Dreams.”

Deep Dives

In one of his most underrated gems, now playing on the Criterion Channel, the Bengali master explored the futility of words and the power of a look.

Dark Passages

Pessimism, melancholy, and corruption come in with the tide in the greatest seaside noirs, including classics by Josef von Sternberg, Ingmar Bergman, and Marcel Carné.

One Scene

The director of Audition and First Love dives into the haunting moral ambiguity of Akira Kurosawa’s crime masterpiece.

In their stillness and melancholy, the B-movie masterpieces of one of Hollywood’s most ingenious producers pushed against the official optimism of American culture during World War II.

Charlie Chaplin earned a remarkable level of autonomy at the height of his career, but he also cultivated a team of loyal collaborators who helped him bring his dreams to the screen.

Veteran French director Bertrand Tavernier reflects on how one of his greatest mentors fused two seemingly contradictory influences—that of the Resistance and of American genre filmmaking—into a remarkably cohesive body of work.

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.