Current | The Criterion Collection

The Criterion Channel’s June 2026 Lineup

Thu, 14 May 2026 11:23:00 +0000

This month on the Criterion Channel, set out on an epic journey with our Odysseys collection, or revisit the foundational Bond classics that introduced the silver screen’s most iconic superspy. A spotlight on Courtney Love’s acting career reveals an incandescent screen performer, while a collection of wedding movies explores the tension and breathless expectation surrounding that fateful walk down the aisle. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including a selection of LGBTQ+ Favorites, Steven Spielberg’s jaw-dropping classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the exclusive premiere of Gary Hustwit’s shape-shifting portrait of Brian Eno, cult classics from Alex Cox, and stylish shorts by Yann Gonzalez.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

STREAMING PREMIERES

Eno

Premiering June 16, with a new version featured each month

A documentary as innovative as its subject, this kaleidoscopic portrait of visionary musician, producer, and self-described “sonic landscaper” Brian Eno is a different experience every time it’s shown. Using custom non-AI software, director Gary Hustwit and digital artist Brendan Dawes created the world’s first generative feature film, which endlessly reedits and resequences hundreds of hours of never-before-seen footage, interviews, and unreleased music into 52 quintillion (or 52 billion billion) possible permutations. Chronicling Eno’s legendary contributions to the band Roxy Music, his influential work as a pioneer of ambient music, and his producing career for artists like David Bowie, U2, and Talking Heads, Eno is a fittingly form-breaking tribute to an artist who changed the way modern music is made.

The Love That Remains

Featuring a new introduction by director Hlynur Pálmason, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

Suffused with tenderness and deadpan humor, The Love That Remains asks: What happens when a relationship ends but the bonds of caring endure? Moving unpredictably through four seasons in the lives of a separating couple—artist Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and fisherman Magnus (Sverrir Guðnason)—and their three children, Hlynur Pálmason’s fourth feature is as vibrantly attuned to the ebb and flow of domestic routine as it is to the stark, spectacular landscape of coastal Iceland. Juggling intimate scenes of adults at work and children at play with wild intrusions of surrealism, this strange and poignant film is a rare study of family life in all its beauty and confusion.

CRITERION ORIGINALS

John Waters’ Adventures in Moviegoing

With Criterion Editions of Hairspray and Desperate Living coming to home video this month, there’s no better time to watch the Pope of Trash discuss his formative moviegoing memories and introduce a selection of favorites.

FEATURING: Brink of Life (1958), The Naked Kiss (1964), Wanda (1970), Story of Women (1988), Last Summer (2023)

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Typhoon Club

A work of raw, elemental power widely regarded as director Shinji Somai’s finest achievement, this intensely visceral take on the coming-of-age film follows an ensemble of junior-high students in a provincial town beset by a summertime malaise as a typhoon looms. When the storm makes landfall, the teens find themselves holed up in their school unsupervised, while another classmate (Yuki Kudo) disappears alone on a harrowing trek to the big city. Set adrift in a world suddenly unmoored, the students let loose their pent-up angst and burgeoning passions in a series of propulsive, phantasmic scenes—part apocalypse, part utopia—as the deluge rages on into the night. In daring long takes, Somai gives material form to the students’ turbulent inner lives.

Nomad

An audacious blast of pop subversion, this touchstone of the Hong Kong New Wave by director Patrick Tam begins as a blissed-out portrait of carefree youth—and continually spins off into ever more shocking realms. In his breakthrough role, golden boy Leslie Cheung stars as one of a quartet of beautiful drifters who spend their days staving off ennui through the pursuit of hedonistic pleasure, until a figure from the past reappears to shatter their idyll. Merging genre-cinema gloss with jolts of avant-garde disruption, Tam arrives at a sublimely destabilizing vision of youthful abandon giving way to harrowing reality.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Fresh Kill (Shu Lea Cheang, 1994)

Criterion Collection Edition #1310

A lesbian couple is drawn into a sinister conspiracy involving corporate greenwashing, toxic waste, and their daughter’s disappearance in this audacious ecosatire.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Shu Lea Cheang and actor Sarita Choudhury, a discussion with Cheang for the film’s thirtieth anniversary, a program on the 2024 theatrical rerelease of the film and Cheang’s self-distribution, and more.

The Game (David Fincher, 1997)*

Criterion Collection Edition #627

An invitation to a mysterious game upends a wealthy investment banker’s calculated existence in David Fincher’s noirish descent into one man’s personal hell.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Fincher and cast and crew members, behind-the-scenes footage, and more.

Martha Graham: Dance on Film

Criterion Collection Edition #406

Celebrate the centennial of the Martha Graham Dance Company with this sampling of the legendary choreographer’s stunning craft.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Martha Graham: The Dancer Revealed, a 1994 documentary produced for PBS’s American Masters series; excerpts from a television pilot featuring composer Aaron Copland discussing his work on Appalachian Spring; and more.

The Harder They Come (Perry Henzell, 1972)

Criterion Collection Edition #83

In the reggae film that brought Rasta rhythms to the world, genre legend Jimmy Cliff stars as a rural musician chasing fame in Kingston—only to achieve notoriety as an outlaw.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Perry Henzell and Jimmy Cliff and an interview with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell.

After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985)

Criterion Collection Edition #1185

An uptown office worker’s downtown hookup spirals into a late-night odyssey of surreal menace in Martin Scorsese’s darkly comic cult classic.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between Scorsese and writer Fran Lebowitz; audio commentary by Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, director of photography Michael Ballhaus, actor and producer Griffin Dunne, and producer Amy Robinson; and more.

The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, 2007)

Criterion Collection Edition #540

Wes Anderson directs this dazzling comedy about three estranged brothers forced to confront their emotional baggage on a soul-searching train voyage across India.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Anderson and cowriters Jason Schwartzman and Roman Coppola, a discussion between Anderson and filmmaker James Ivory on the music used in the film, a behind-the-scenes documentary, and more.

Repo Man (Alex Cox, 1984)

Criterion Collection Edition #654

A veteran repo man and his punk protégé chase a mysterious Chevy Malibu across a desolate LA in this grungily hilarious cult favorite.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Alex Cox and cast and crew members, deleted scenes, a roundtable discussion about the making of the film, and more.

Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941)

Criterion Collection Edition #118

A Hollywood director posing as a hobo in his quest to make a socially conscious film finds romance and comic chaos on his journey across Depression-era America.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by filmmakers Noah Baumbach, Kenneth Bowser, Christopher Guest, and Michael McKean; the documentary Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer (1990); and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Alex Cox’s Punk Provocations

A patron saint of punk cinema and borderless storytelling, Alex Cox remains one of the greatest subversives to ever pick up a camera, a rebel auteur who blends gonzo surrealism, anarchic irreverence, and blistering anticapitalist and anti-imperialist critique. From the radioactive deadpan of the sci-fi comedy Repo Man to the hallucinatory fever dream of his audacious biopic Walker, his films burn with a restless outsider energy, while smuggling politics, poetry, and outré humor into every frame.

FEATURING: Repo Man (1984), Straight to Hell (1987), Walker (1987), Highway Patrolman (1991)

Fantasy and Fear: Short Films by Yann Gonzalez

Sexy, surreal, and darkly stylish, the short films of French director Yann Gonzalez (Knife+Heart) capture ecstatic moments of human (and sometimes beyond human) connection, merging throbbing eroticism with a charge of giallo-like menace to probe the inextricable links between love, sex, death, and transcendence. Shot in ravishing neon-noir style and submerged in hypnotic synth soundscapes, these fearlessly queer fusions of art and pop cinema—including the beautifully kinky, strangely life-affirming monster movie Islands—pulse with polymorphous sexuality and gothic romanticism.

FEATURING: By the Kiss (2006), Intermission (2007), I Hate You Little Girls (2008), Three Celestial Bodies (2009), We Will Never Be Alone Again (2012), Land of My Dreams (2012), Islands (2017)

Directed by Eric Rohmer

Among the most singular, miraculous bodies of work in all of cinema, the films of French auteur Eric Rohmer constitute a genre unto themselves. Gently existential, hyperarticulate character studies set against vivid seasonal landscapes, these dialogue-driven yet gracefully cinematic films probe universal moral questions about love, desire, and the intricacies of connection with wry humor and an invitingly relaxed naturalism. From the wintry philosophical parable My Night at Maud’s to the sublime summertime melancholy of The Green Ray to the autumnal emotional maturity of Love in the Afternoon, his work is evergreen in its piercing insight into human contradiction and folly.

FEATURES: Suzanne’s Career (1963), La collectionneuse (1967), My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), Love in the Afternoon (1972), A Good Marriage (1982), Pauline at the Beach (1983), Full Moon in Paris (1984), The Green Ray (1986), A Tale of Springtime (1990), A Tale of Winter (1992), A Tale of Summer (1996), A Tale of Autumn (1998)

SHORTS: Presentation, or Charlotte and Her Steak (1951), Véronique and Her Dunce (1958), The Bakery Girl of Monceau (1963), Nadja in Paris (1964), A Modern Coed (1966)

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

With Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day in theaters this month, there’s no better time to revisit his sci-fi landmark, an awe-inspiring vision of contact with extraterrestrial life.

*Wild at Heart**

Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern are outlaw lovers on the run in David Lynch’s berserk blend of nightmare noir, southern-gothic soap opera, and surreal Americana.

Pacific Heights

It’s the ultimate yuppie nightmare when a young couple rents their spare apartment to a psychopath in this twisted thriller starring a memorably villainous Michael Keaton.

ANIME

The Garden of Words*

Visionary animator Makoto Shinkai (Your Name) explores the universal search for connection through the story of a bittersweet summertime friendship between a teenage boy and a mysterious woman.

DOCUMENTARIES

Gary Hustwit: Documentary by Design

From the cities we live in to the products we use every day to the typefaces we communicate through, how do the subtle but impactful forces of design shape our lives? That’s the question at the heart of the illuminating documentaries of Gary Hustwit (Eno), who invites us to see the world around us with fresh eyes. Whether delving deep into the story behind one of the world’s most recognizable fonts (Helvetica) or breaking down the complex art of urban planning (Urbanized), Hustwit’s films reveal the often hidden connections between design, psychology, and human behavior.

FEATURING: Helvetica (2007), Objectified (2009), Urbanized (2011), Rams (2018)

PREMIERING JUNE 16: Eno (2024)

Kedi

See the vibrant metropolis of Istanbul through the eyes of the street cats who roam the city freely and have become essential parts of the communities they inhabit.

Two Films by Daniel Peddle: The Aggressives and Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later

Filmed in New York City between 1997 and 2003, Daniel Peddle’s The Aggressives broke new ground in cinematic representation with its bold, unfiltered immersion into the lives of trans men and masculine-presenting lesbians of color who defy social expectations in their quest to live authentically. Peddle revisits the trailblazing subjects of the original film in Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later, a timely, intimate update that captures their ongoing struggles and hard-won victories in a world shaped by the turbulence of ICE arrests and evolving attitudes toward trans rights and health care.

FEATURING: The Aggressives (2005), Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later (2023)

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

The Lost Okoroshi

A Kafkaesque transformation into a mute purple spirit sends an average security guard on a surreal journey through the city of Lagos.

Motel Destino

Loyalties and desires intertwine at a roadside sex hotel under the burning blue skies of the Brazilian coast in this feverishly erotic tropical noir.

SHORT FILMS

LGBTQ+ Shorts

Stories of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and the simple but radical, often dangerous act of just existing as a queer person are on display in these empathetic and innovative shorts, which reflect the wide spectrum of experiences that make up the LGBTQ+ rainbow.

FEATURING: Greetings from Washington, D.C. (1981), Janine (1990), She Don’t Fade (1991), Pull Your Head to the Moon: Stories of Creole Women (1992), Vanilla Sex (1992), Gender Troublemakers (1993), The Potluck and the Passion (1993), Snowfire (1994), Greetings from Africa (1996), I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard (2012), Blood Below the Skin (2015), The Foundation (2015), Vámonos (2015), Bayard & Me (2017), T (2019), Rupert Remembers (2000), Another Hayride (2021), i get so sad sometimes (2021), The Man of My Dreams (2021), Bold Eagle (2022), A Place on the Edge of Breath (2022), How to Carry Water (2023), MnM (2023), The Script (2023), Vermont (2023), The Callers (2024), God Is Good (2024), Grace (2024), One Day This Kid (2024), Newbies (2025)

WassupKaylee

A young content creator learns how far she’ll go for a chance at viral fame in this clear-eyed and compassionate look at coming of age in an era of parasocial intimacy.

Newbies

On a neon-drenched New York City night, two strangers wrestle with queer longing and desire as events rewind to reveal what broke them.

The Delta: Across the Lines

Michael Koresky — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. The foundational myth of the American dream puts forth the idea that we can transcend the class into which we are born. On a parallel track, sexuality has long been sold as fixed, a definitive, biological understanding of identity. This ideological contradiction is at the core of Ira Sachs’s debut feature, The Delta (1996), which foregrounds questions of class and race alongside its depiction of gay struggle—an unusual focus even among the radical works of the New Queer Cinema, of which Sachs’s film is a part.

That revolutionary movement—which sprang up in the wake of the AIDS crisis and was enabled by an independent-film boom that allowed artists to express themselves with more accessible gear and lower budgets—was not governed by dictates of realism. But Sachs’s coming-of-age film feels brutally authentic, rewriting the rules of the adolescent drama in ways both invigorating and unsettling. (Sachs’s simultaneous interest in and distrust of realism was evident in two early shorts he made in the first half of the 1990s, Vaudeville and Lady, both of which poked at vérité traditions, existing on the razor’s edge between realism and camp.) Though The Delta was acclaimed at its Toronto and Sundance Film Festival premieres and went on to receive domestic theatrical distribution, it is perhaps not as widely remembered as other New Queer Cinema cornerstones. This is likely owing to its refusal to provide easy answers to the questions it poses about the unbridgeable chasms that define American society.

The Delta’s original marketing materials give no indication of its ambition and curiosity, or its sensitivities to the experiences of nonwhite immigrant communities. Most of the New Queer Cinema’s breakout hits were made by and feature white men, and their theatrical and home-video ad campaigns capitalized on stars who conformed to the period’s racially coded standards of attractiveness—and who were often baring skin. Strand Releasing’s poster for The Delta is a prime example of a distributor leading with beefcake in the promotion of a gay film: the image includes only a shirtless, smiling Shayne Gray. Yet this conventionally handsome white teenager, who plays closeted upper-middle-class high schooler Lincoln Bloom, represents only one half of the film’s pair of starring roles. The other is the nuanced, wildly charismatic Thang Chan, a biracial Black and Vietnamese first-time actor cast as Minh Nguyen, a gay immigrant from Vietnam whose life intersects fatefully with Lincoln’s while the two are out cruising one night.

The setting of The Delta is Memphis, Tennessee, where Sachs grew up, and the rich, tactile sense of place all but wafts off the screen. The grain of the 16 mm stock on which the film was shot is as essential to its overall feel and texture as the naturalism of the actors and the hushed, contemplative way that Sachs trains his camera on quiet back rooms and dark roads. The opening shot is bathed in shadow, as a young man, his face obscured but his torso exposed, ambles down a clandestine street to the sound of crickets. Soon we realize that this is a spot where young hustlers wait for johns to pick them up in cars; Sachs captures the street trade with patience and a sense of simple witnessing, with no musical score to betray authorial judgment or perspective. Here is where Lincoln and Minh first meet, connecting with a kiss and a blow job. After Lincoln drives off, Sachs cuts away to Minh, who is seen heading home on his moped. It seems unlikely that these two young men, their brief sexual union shrouded in darkness, will ever meet again.

Sachs subsequently follows the daytime customs and nighttime exploits of Lincoln, who, we quickly learn, comes from privilege, as indicated by the glistening white Dodge Dynasty parked outside his pristine suburban home, situated in a neighborhood far more moneyed than the areas of Memphis that Sachs introduces us to later in the film. The director efficiently lays out the racially charged dynamics within this house: Lincoln’s parents employ a Black maid, in front of whom they make sarcastic, hushed remarks about “our esteemed congressman” (evidently a Black man) during a starched-shirt family lunch. Oblivious to all this, Lincoln—just another horny teenager, after all—is excused from the table to fetch his grandmother’s pills, but while in the bathroom he can’t resist a quick masturbation session while his family waits for him at the dining-room table. It’s the first of many divides—in this case, one between appearances and impropriety—that Sachs will illustrate throughout the film.

Even within Lincoln’s predominantly white community, Sachs is careful to expose stark differences in social strata. As Lincoln and his pals embark on one long night of hanging out, they pick up a female friend from a house considerably more modest than Lincoln’s, and the teenage girl’s expletive-laden front-yard quarrel with her mother, who accuses her daughter of stealing cash from her purse, harshly and uncomfortably underlines the divergent ways in which families discuss—or, in Lincoln’s case, likely don’t discuss—the specter of money. As the night wears on, the kids aimlessly smoke pot, chilling in outdoor garages or indoor rec rooms, enacting obscure fragments of fights and flirtations. Lincoln forcefully tries to kiss Monica, the pertly perfect blond girl he’s dating, and becomes offended when she resists, calling her a “bitch.” Then Lincoln retreats into his shadow self, returning to the cruising spot we saw at the film’s opening. But this time, he tests his own boundaries by allowing himself to get picked up by a white, middle-aged businessman, who brings him to a local hotel room. Lincoln’s moonlighting only goes so far; after he is commanded to strip during the older man’s awkward attempt at dom-sub role-play (“You like being Daddy’s boy?”), a turned-off Lincoln gathers his things and leaves. In a film about the tentative breaching of divides, this line—the boundary that would typically separate a rich kid from the hardscrabble life of a rent boy—is one that even teenage sexual curiosity can’t bring him to cross.

After this moment of self-subordination, Lincoln retreats to a more familiar enactment of desire and goes furtively cruising in a local arcade. Here he reencounters Minh and again becomes the object of another man’s lustful glance. At this point, Thang Chan overtakes the movie. Magnetic and aggressive in his pursuit of Lincoln, Minh is forthright, unapologetic: he calls Lincoln “cute” and “sexy,” comes right out and asks if he is gay, and constantly refers to him with the diminutive “boy,” a word that has both sexual and racial connotations as a term of implied inferiority—though coming from Minh it sounds as much like a term of endearment as a power move. Minh—who goes by John—seduces Lincoln, at least emotionally. Just hours after Lincoln had somewhat needily asked his girlfriend if she loved him, Minh is now the one asking Lincoln, “Do you want to love me?” Lincoln’s curiosity is piqued, his youthful ego likely stroked. When the two decide to abscond with a boat to go downriver on the Mississippi, it’s still unclear who is using or exploiting whom.

These knotty—and irresolvable—issues are not the normal province of gay coming-of-age stories, which often build to some kind of confrontation or redemptive conclusion. Here, Sachs provides no easy comfort; instead of fashioning a common cause-and-effect arc, he allows the film to ebb and flow around the inchoate feeling of experiencing the world as an outsider. A portrait of queer interiority, The Delta explores how such emotions are compounded by parallel oppressions. The film’s sense of authenticity—or at least humane curiosity—is likely thanks to Sachs’s approach to the material. After writing a string of initial drafts, the director had reconstituted the script after meeting and getting to know Thang Chan. Sachs later said, “I rewrote the film with him in mind, using a lot of his own history. So the character couldn’t have existed without the actor . . . He was an immigrant. He grew up in Saigon with a GI for a father.”

In preparing for The Delta, Sachs spent nearly half a year back in Memphis, familiarizing himself with the city’s Vietnamese community. After writing an early version of the screenplay, he conducted a series of videotaped, improvisational exercises with his nonprofessional actors, the results of which would inspire new drafts. It’s difficult to imagine The Delta without this step in the process, which evidently allowed Sachs to see the world from a perspective different from his own; when making a film about the wide gap between the privileged few and those who are never given the opportunity to rise, the author’s ability to put himself in a position of discomfort—an act of self-implication—is crucial. Among The Delta’s most discomfiting ideas is that queerness can create only a momentary bond between people from different sides of stark socioeconomic and racial divides.

In the film’s controversial final passage, Sachs overturns everything we may have come to expect. Following Lincoln and Minh’s fleeting connection on the river, Lincoln goes home and tries to rekindle a romantic relationship with Monica, once again seeking the comforts of the closet and suburban privilege, at least for now. Minh—beaten and abandoned by a desperate, scared Lincoln after the two nearly get arrested for playing with illegal fireworks—returns to his own life as well, though by contrast it is one marked by economic deprivation and stasis. In the last scene, Minh tells a sweet-natured African American man who picks him up at a bar that he “plays games with people.” He claims, with a hollow forlornness, that he is a liar by nature, and that, though he can flatter and whisper sweet nothings, he never thinks of his hookups again.

Are we to believe that everything Minh told Lincoln was a lie, a ploy to get closer to him, to try and transcend the socioeconomic and racial boundaries that keep him impoverished and feeling unloved? Or is he lying now, as a way of creating distance between himself and his failed relationship with the white boy he seemed to have true affection for? Did we—like Lincoln—only hear what we wanted to hear? We will never know; the shocking act of violence that closes the film doesn’t provide an answer, just further fogs the lens. For his part, Sachs has said he always felt The Delta “was too German! I had watched just a hair too much [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder.” One can sense, in the final scenes, the grim influence of that great queer auteur’s work (particularly his darkest, most unsparing films, such as In a Year of 13 Moons or Fox and His Friends), but these fatalistic moments carry the weight of a specifically American tragedy.

However one feels about the swift, sad ending, it’s undeniable that it represents a kind of challenge largely unseen in gay-themed films, which continue to revolve around images and stories of positivity and pride. In a Village Voice article about the state of queer cinema in 2002, B. Ruby Rich, who just a decade earlier had coined the term “New Queer Cinema,” wrote: “The prevalent Queer Lite formula endlessly recycles romantic comedy, pausing every now and then for tragedy, then getting back on the dance floor. Issues of race, class, family trauma, and life-changing desire are not likely to pop up on the current menu.” Rich then identified The Delta as one of the rare exceptions, calling it a “groundbreaking work.”

Throughout his career, Sachs has proved his commitment to questions of contemporary queer living. In such films as Keep the Lights On (2012), a startling portrait of an on-again, off-again relationship severely strained by drug addiction, and Love Is Strange (2014), about an aging long-term couple separated by cruel economic realities, Sachs dramatizes deeply personal stories in which gay men are never arbiters of social assimilation, and always exist outside the forward march of hetero time. Like these films, The Delta reminds viewers of those untraversable regions that make queer sexuality both a privilege and a burden in a world that has traditionally made no physical or emotional space for it.

The Defiant Ironies of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation

Michael Atkinson — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 08:44:00 +0000

Deep Dives

You look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Third Generation (1979), and you see the snarky, risky spirit of the New Wave movements that emerged around the world in the 1960s and ’70s in full, defiant bloom. But what does that mean, exactly, and what is this crazy, goofy, pugnacious movie-movie really up to? This particular late RWF is, in its appetite for farcical social critique and artfully canned melodrama, typical of its manically prolific filmmaker. (Let’s recall the deluge: over forty projects in fourteen years, not including the scripts he didn’t direct or the theater productions he didn’t record.) The tone is characteristically arch, but at the time the topic was new and raw. The subject at hand is the revolutionary pretensions of the Red Army Faction, the anti-imperialist guerrilla-terrorist outfit that terrorized Germany with bombings and assassinations throughout and beyond the seventies.

We usually get a hold of political movies by determining whether they are pro or con, progressive or conservative, but this film begs to be scanned as something else, something distinctly unserious but also dead serious about its lack of seriousness. In other words, what we have is the rampant flowering of the Ironic Film—an impertinent New Wave spawn of which Fassbinder was a committed practitioner. Coming between the less brazenly ironic but still ironically seasoned The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), The Third Generation is a full-on siege of hyper-irony, snarking and cosplaying and mocking its own diegetic constructions. Violent political reality is merely meat into the grinder.

What we usually think about when we consider “irony in film” is merely irony expressed or manifested in a narrative twist or a performance moment or a doubled meaning in a bit of dialogue. In the sixties, the Ironic Film became an entire genre, composed of works that were conscientiously ironic in their essential identity, fiber, and visual makeup. Broadly speaking, this phenomenon could include the overt metafilm as solidified by Godard and Rivette (inhabited by people who seem to know they’re in a movie) as well as the films of their many successors (Dušan Makavejev, Věra Chytilová, Nagisa Oshima, Kira Muratova, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, etc.) and contemporary filmmakers working in disparate modes, from Quentin Tarantino and Radu Jude to Joel and Ethan Coen, Roy Andersson, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Charlie Kaufman, and Wes Anderson. You could say that the Ironic Film is a realm in which the distance between the viewer and the characters on-screen is doubled, while the distance between the viewer and the filmmaker is halved. “Realism” is sometimes present, but often in cracked-mirror form. It would seem, surveying the field, that a sense of spirited irreverence—toward classical earnest storytelling and the world in general—is required.

Fassbinder was a card-carrying Ironist; though a few of his films (such as 1974’s Effi Briest) seem sincere top to bottom, the bulk of his mountainous oeuvre is chin-deep in reflexivity, anti-nostalgic nostalgia, bitter camp, and satirical archness. The Third Generation, in fact, barrels closer to the edge of outright farce than many. Immediately, we’re hit with a contextual title scroll explaining that this film about domestic terrorism is “a comedy about parlor games . . . full of suspense, excitement, logic, cruelty, and madness, just like the fairy tales we tell children to help them prepare for death through the changes of life.” Well now—knives out. Of course, it was hardly as though Fassbinder didn’t see that making a German film in 1979 riffing on the Baader-Meinhof atrocities (which involved bombing corporate buildings and kidnapping politicians) was playing with a loaded gun. (You didn’t see Herzog or Wenders signing up for that kind of risk.) He had actually put off addressing the topic for years—his initial launch into filmmaking, in 1969, came a year after the RAF’s first major bombing, of an empty department store. A full decade and nearly thirty Fassbinder films and TV projects later, the man finally decided to tackle the scenario on the big screen, exposing it as a circus of opportunism, hypocrisy, and foolishness.

Often augmented with obscene and/or cryptic texts copied from public bathroom walls and overheard conversations, The Third Generation’s “action” begins with Eddie Constantine’s double-dealing industrialist manipulating the Schopenhauer-quoting terrorist cell into kidnapping him, it seems, to somehow help his company sell computer technology. The hint of unlikely conspiracy is merely the undernote to the madness, as the cabal otherwise flounces, plays spy games (and Monopoly), dresses in drag, screws, cites Bakunin and Hegel, discusses guerrilla camps while drinking champagne, watches TV, meets covertly in Japanese restaurants, and tries to figure out what to do with a wan junkie in their secret crash pad. It’s an all-star cast running impishly in circles (Hanna Schygulla, Bulle Ogier, Udo Kier, Volker Spengler, Margit Carstensen, Harry Baer, Y Sa Lo as that junkie, and Günther Kaufmann, who is at one point in blackface), and somehow, weirdly, the absurdities build inexplicable tension and the film quickly gets hot to the touch—as if we’re watching chimpanzees having a catch with a hand grenade. (The soundtrack, which gradually accumulates shrill layers of crosstalk, TV, radio reportage, off-screen speechifying, and the sound of a wailing baby, contributes significantly to the mounting stress.) Eventually, shit actually begins to go down, bodies fall, and the cell scrambles into abrupt action, going underground, donning new getups (clown costumes, even), and deciding to knock over a bank—resulting in more chaos and bloodshed.

As raucous and barbed as Fassbinder’s movie is, plenty of critics at the time still suspected that he hadn’t quite figured out how he felt about domestic terrorism. By the midseventies he was on the record as considering the RAF crimes to be “incomprehensible.” Could there, within the golden bad boy of the New German Cinema, have lurked a play-safe bourgeois? Anyway, we certainly know the RAF vexed Fassbinder, because we can see him in the remarkable anthology film Germany in Autumn (1978), exhausted and naked and wrestling melodramatically with, among other things, his yen for pills, his new film about the terrorists, and his moral confusion over the murder of industrialist/ex-SS officer Hanns-Martin Schleyer the year before, as well as the subsequent suicides of the imprisoned Baader-Meinhof renegades. The ultraviolent “German Autumn” of 1977 got its historical name from this film, in fact, not vice versa; assembled without credits by assorted New German filmmakers and artists, including Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Heinrich Böll, and Edgar Reitz, it is nothing if not a tissue of uncertainty, an unresolved and spontaneous impression of the agonies of the moment. Germany in Autumn seriously poses the eternal toxic question of all radicalism: when does violent resistance to homicidal authority by way of “unconventional” (read: non-state-funded) means transcend ethical righteousness and become “terrorism”? And who gets to decide?

Fassbinder wouldn’t live long enough to experience the distance in years often needed to sort out the ethical spaghetti of citizen-vs.-state conflict, a task finally attempted by Uli Edel (only two years younger than Fassbinder) decades later, with The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008). A missile barrage of protest action and rock-and-roll cool and alarmingly decisive street combat, Edel’s film may not quite heroize its titular guerrillas, but it certainly exults in their crusade, sympathizing perhaps most with the young Europeans in the seventies who took Andreas Baader et al. as messiahs and who were knowingly, innocently appalled by bureaucrats and CEOs staging bloodshed in Vietnam and Iran and elsewhere and getting away scot-free and with pockets bulging. Edel implicitly asks (and so do we): who could blame them?

In contrast, Fassbinder offers no such sympathy to either side of the struggle. His politics were always personal and social and sexual, and most often concerned with autopsying the layers of hypocrisy therein. Hence, while The Third Generation’s few cops and corporate figures are spies and crooks, its RAF warriors are in turn charlatans and rapists and cosplayers, cornered into actual violence by the industrial state itself. But is it a relativist fallacy, to think that just as citizen-on-state violence breaks the social contract, state-on-citizen violence does as well, and so therefore warrants a response? It’s a question that continues to dominate our media dialogue, in a post-9/11 America and a landscape newly injected with stormtroopers and extra-judiciary killings. If The Third Generation is any indication, Fassbinder must’ve thought the whole discussion to be naive, and that to come down solidly on either side of the conflict is to fall victim to idealism or power madness or both. A cynical position, to be sure, particularly for an artist who didn’t seem to want to take a position at all. Outside Germany, the film was hailed by New Wave–loving critics, but at home its theatrical run was tellingly the occasion for violent protests and death threats—presumably at the hands of those pro-RAF young radicals, who had probably longed for a compadre in Fassbinder, and instead found their generation’s most defiant ironist.

John Singleton’s Hood Trilogy: Born and Raised in South Central

Julian Kimble — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 07:29:00 +0000

In April 1992, John Singleton was en route to the set of his second film when he heard the verdict on the radio. A predominantly white jury had acquitted four police officers who, a year earlier, had been caught on video severely beating Rodney King. The Los Angeles Police Department, which has a long history of racist violence, had once again escaped accountability, enabled by a justice system that has so often failed Black communities. As a Gen Xer who grew up in LA, Singleton understood this harsh truth all too well, having seen it unfold repeatedly over the course of his young life. Furious, he drove straight to the Ventura County courthouse, where he was swarmed by reporters. He told them: “The judicial system feels no responsibility to Black people—never has, never will.” But responsibility is at the center of Singleton’s work. Throughout his career, the director devoted himself to illuminating the lives of Black people, particularly those residing in the part of LA where he was raised: South Central.

From the moment he graduated film school in 1990, at the age of twenty-two, Singleton was insistent on obtaining creative control, because he wanted to demonstrate the humanity of the people living in his community, flaws and all. In a string of movies he called his Hood Trilogy—Boyz n the Hood (1991), Poetic Justice (1993), and Baby Boy (2001)—he showcased his gift for grounding his characters in the specificities of time and place. The Angelenos in these films work at the Fox Hills Mall, party on Crenshaw Boulevard, and spend wild nights at the Snooty Fox Motor Inn. They put tinted windows and ten-inch gold Dayton rims on their Honda Accords. They belong to street gangs like the Rollin’ 60s Crips and the Crenshaw Mafia Bloods. Details like these—along with the characters’ clothes, hairstyles, and accents— met Singleton’s high threshold for authenticity.

As a subject for his filmmaking, South Central remained a place of comfort and expertise for Singleton, even as his ambitions carried him elsewhere—to 1920s rural Florida in Rosewood (1997), one of his best films, and then to the world of Hollywood franchises with 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003), which became his greatest commercial success. No matter where his career took him, he was always rooted in his respect for the place where he grew up. His trilogy is the key to understanding his artistry; taken together, these three movies shine a light on a community that was still trying to make good on the promise of the Great Migration, in which droves of Black Americans moved from the South to cities like Los Angeles in pursuit of better lives—only to encounter racism, violence, and injustice in their new homes. Throughout these films, Singleton shows how, generations after this huge demographic shift, Black people continued to make their own way in the face of extraordinary obstacles.

Boyz n the Hood laid the foundation for Singleton’s LA. This groundbreaking film—a loosely autobiographical tale of Black teenagers trying to dodge the violence and inertia of their neighborhood at the tail end of the crack epidemic—grew out of a screenplay that the director had worked on while studying at the University of Southern California’s Filmic Writing program. By the time he graduated, Singleton had already pulled off an unimaginable feat by getting the attention of Columbia Pictures chair Frank Price, who wanted to develop the script. Realizing that he needed to think beyond the role of writer to ensure that his work would be faithfully translated to the screen, Singleton said yes on the condition that he could direct the project. Despite his lack of experience and his sparse reel of two Super 8 films, he was adamant that a white or non-Angeleno director would be unable to execute his vision. He spent the fall of 1990 in the director’s chair, making what would become his debut feature.

In Boyz n the Hood, LA is where children walk through dice games that erupt into fights, where kids are robbed of their youth after leading one another to the remnants of crime scenes and rotting corpses, where the innocent can fall victim to targeted attacks and stray bullets. But while the film never shies away from the dangers of its setting, Singleton is deliberate in showing that South Central is a place where real people live, and that its inhabitants are not defined by circumstances they didn’t create. The film devotes time to its characters’ interior lives, offering familiarity to one sector of the audience while providing context and insight to those whose only knowledge of LA’s Black communities comes from what they’ve seen in the news.

Boyz n the Hood

At the heart of the film are Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), Ricky (Morris Chestnut), and Doughboy (Ice Cube), three adolescents with simple desires and dreams. In addition to his goal of going to college, Tre’s priority is consummating his relationship with his girlfriend, Brandi (Nia Long). He’s very bright, but that alone doesn’t insulate him from the brutality of his surroundings, no matter how proactive his parents (sharply played by Laurence Fishburne and Angela Bassett) try to be. Tre’s friend Ricky, who is already a father, just wants to play football at USC, but his prodigious talent won’t save him. Doughboy, Ricky’s half brother, is hoping to stay out of jail, a fate he has struggled to avoid since his arrest for theft as a young child. And though he can’t fully admit it, he wants his mother (Tyra Ferrell) to adore him as much as she does Ricky.

Like a large swath of his generation, Singleton grew up a fan of the teen movies that John Hughes made during the 1980s. But the slice of mostly white, suburban Reagan-era life presented in Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off wasn’t representative of what Singleton had experienced in his youth. He wanted to tell stories about Black adolescence but with a sharper edge than Cooley High (1975) or House Party, the latter of which became a success the same year that Boyz n the Hood went into production. When it was released during the summer of 1991, Boyz n the Hood was an even bigger hit than either of these earlier films, earning nearly $58 million against a $6 million budget. Aside from making Singleton an instant star (and a rare young Black director willing to speak his mind about the entertainment industry while operating within the studio system), the film introduced audiences to his world through the kind of narrative details that could have been captured only by someone intimately familiar with this milieu.

Unlike many of its predecessors in the canon of Black teen movies, Boyz n the Hood treats survival as uncertain. Tre, Ricky, and Doughboy understand that they are as likely to meet their demise at the hands of their peers as they are to be killed by the police. While the film positions Black male adolescence as fraught, the three friends don’t spend the movie wallowing in misery, largely because of their relationships with one another. Tre regards Ricky and Doughboy as his brothers, and Singleton makes sure to show them experiencing the everyday joys of youth despite the perils they face. There are moments of levity amid the hardships, as in a montage in which Ricky runs the gauntlet at football practice while Tre tries to convince Brandi to sleep with him and Doughboy crassly remarks, “He still ain’t fucked her yet,” after a swig of St. Ides.

The balance of coming-of-age earnestness and devastating tragedy in Boyz n the Hood pushed Singleton to the forefront of a new class of Black filmmakers. It had not been until the eighties that several Black directors—including such pioneers as Spike Lee, Robert Townsend, and Keenen Ivory Wayans—were given the opportunity to helm major studio projects about Black characters. For a brief period in the nineties, Hollywood took interest in expanding this group, opening its doors to Reginald Hudlin, Albert and Allen Hughes, Julie Dash, Ernest Dickerson, Mario Van Peebles, Kasi Lemmons, and Matty Rich. Among this cohort, Singleton was the most lauded right out of the gate. In 1992, he received Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Director, becoming both the first Black nominee and the youngest to ever compete for the latter award. That same year, he also directed the nine-minute music video for Michael Jackson’s “Remember the Time,” an ambitious project that cast Eddie Murphy, Magic Johnson, and Iman in a grandiose re-creation of ancient Egypt.

Singleton had grown up idolizing art-house titans like François Truffaut and Akira Kurosawa, but he also referred to himself as “a child of Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and E.T.” Soon, he was socializing with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and other members of Hollywood’s elite. But perhaps the most meaningful relationship he had with another filmmaker during this time was the one he formed with Lee, whose feature debut, She’s Gotta Have It, he had watched just before arriving at USC. Lee’s success in the late eighties had inspired Singleton, who wanted to deliver a distinctive cinematic vision of Los Angeles in the same way that Lee’s work had made audiences see New York City anew. In his next film, Singleton continued exploring the world of South Central, this time through the prism of a romantic drama.

Poetic Justice begins, in disorienting fashion, with a movie within a movie: we see two characters (played by Billy Zane and Lori Petty) sharing a romantic dinner that soon turns confrontational. When a shooting breaks out at the drive-in theater where the film is being shown, Justice (Janet Jackson) experiences a traumatic event that thrusts her into a deep state of depression: the death of her boyfriend, Markell (Q-Tip). The violence of these initial moments echoes the tragic circumstances surrounding the release of Boyz n the Hood. Two people were killed and over thirty were injured in incidents that took place during the film’s opening weekend. When some theaters began canceling screenings and the media suggested the movie itself should be held accountable, Singleton called any attempts to blame his work “artistic racism.”

Poetic Justice departs from its predecessor in notable ways. Where Boyz n the Hood zeroed in on the plight of young Black men, its follow-up is propelled by a female perspective. Justice’s poetry, which Singleton often features through voice-over, conveys her innermost thoughts. Art is an outlet of self-expression for Justice, as well as a coping mechanism. Though primarily set in South Central, Poetic Justice is also a road movie that ventures up the gorgeous Northern California coast to Oakland. Justice is goaded by her friend Iesha (Regina King), a lush with a knack for cutting insults, into accompanying her on a trip with her vain, insecure boyfriend, Chicago (Joe Torry), and his coworker Lucky (Tupac Shakur). Reluctant from the beginning, Justice nearly abandons the journey at the last minute when she spots Lucky, who has tried, unsuccessfully, to charm her while dropping off mail at the salon where she works. While confined to the delivery truck, the four of them spend significant time bickering—particularly Justice and Lucky, whose fights turn vicious on occasion.

Poetic Justice

Though the film explores the friction between Black men and women, it also examines broader divisions within the Black community—strife that travels across gender and generational lines. Older women castigate their younger counterparts for their naivete in romance. At the same time, the collision of pride and perceived disrespect makes it easy for conflict to erupt among men; for instance, when Lucky chides Chicago for not joining their union, it becomes clear that their relationship as colleagues has not matured into a true friendship. Poetic Justice places its characters in tight spaces, forcing them to work their shit out—with one another and themselves.

The film was a massive flex for Singleton because of the creative latitude he was granted and the attention he was able to attract. He wrote the role of Justice specifically with Jackson in mind and brought the performer (who had begun her career as a child actor) back to the screen in between the release of Rhythm Nation 1814 and Janet—two albums that showed her willingness to take creative risks and her propensity for reinvention, and that cemented her as one of the biggest pop stars in the world. (Janet has always been viewed in tandem with Poetic Justice: Jackson promoted the two projects simultaneously, and “Again,” her Oscar-nominated song originally written for the film, plays over its closing credits.) Knowing that he needed a commanding presence opposite Jackson, Singleton cast Shakur, whose charisma, forthrightness, and volatility had made him increasingly popular as a rapper, in demand as an actor, and frequently discussed in the media. Singleton also recruited literary icon Maya Angelou to write Justice’s poetry and to play a community elder named Aunt June in a sequence highlighting the generational conflicts explored in the film. “Baby, what would you know about love?” she asks Iesha with a mixture of sweetness, wisdom, and condescension.

The scope of Singleton’s ambition and power couldn’t guarantee the results that studio executives value. Poetic Justice received more than twice the budget of Boyz n the Hood and made less than half of what that film earned at the box office. Years later, though, the success of Singleton’s sophomore feature can be found beyond these numbers, in the way Justice and Lucky’s relationship has endured in the popular imagination, their images immortalized by graphic T-shirts and GIFs. Once again, Singleton had created a cinematic world out of details from his neighborhood: the signs marking the Crenshaw district, the murals adorning its walls. Poetic Justice travels from South Central to the Bay and back; by the film’s conclusion, the characters are different versions of themselves. Years later, Singleton returned to South Central with a sharper perspective.

Each film in the Hood Trilogy opens with some indication of the territory Singleton intends to cover. The opening title card of Boyz n the Hood pushes forward over a black screen while the sound of a drive-by breaks out, a frenzy of screeching tires, gunfire, and panic. The words that appear at the beginning of Poetic Justice—“Once Upon a Time in South Central LA”—are an ironic nod to the fact that this love story will not be a fairy tale. Baby Boy takes a similar introductory approach. After a quote from psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing, which addresses the effects of racism on young Black men’s development, Singleton cuts to the most surreal image in the trilogy: that of a grown man nestled in a womb, amniotic fluid sloshing around him. This is Joseph “Jody” Summers (Tyrese Gibson), a twenty-year-old who, despite having fathered two children with two different women, still lives at home with his mother, Juanita (AJ Johnson). She is young enough to want her own life, and her new love interest—Melvin (Ving Rhames), a brawny ex-con with a landscaping business—is a major threat to Jody’s infantile existence. Instead of moving in with his girlfriend, Yvette (Taraji P. Henson), Jody navigates life like an overgrown teenager, stuck between childhood and adulthood.

Though it explores themes similar to those in Boyz n the Hood, Baby Boy isn’t a coming-of-age film in the same way. Jody is a legal adult, but he’s trapped in a postadolescent limbo despite having grown-man responsibilities. His narrative trajectory gave Singleton the chance to update his view of South Central. In Boyz n the Hood, the neighborhood is what Tre wants to escape; in Poetic Justice (whose themes of gender and generational conflict reverberate in Baby Boy), it’s a place the characters leave and then return to with new outlooks on life. In contrast, Baby Boy focuses on people who have survived their teenage years but never left the area, either because they chose not to or because of a lack of options. And though Jody has reached young adulthood, he still isn’t safe from an early grave—his biggest fear.

Baby Boy

Baby Boy’s presentation of the city is also an extension of what Singleton achieved in Boyz n the Hood and Poetic Justice. He captures the beauty of South Central in subtle ways, in scenes that chronicle times spent in backyards, salons, and shopping centers off Crenshaw. Like Singleton’s previous films, Baby Boy emphasizes the importance of Black fatherhood—a subject explored in Boyz n the Hood through the character of Furious Styles, who offers Tre the kind of structure and guidance his friends lack, and in Poetic Justice through Lucky’s development as a present and caring parent. Jody wants to be that for both of his children, but his immaturity makes it hard for him to be a capable provider, forcing the gainfully employed Yvette to shoulder more responsibility. Considering the film’s depth of insight into the challenges of parenthood, it’s understandable that Singleton felt he couldn’t have made it until that point in his life, after he had become a father himself.

Despite the dysfunctional, sometimes toxic nature of Jody and Yvette’s relationship, they clearly love each other. Even when he shows these characters at their worst, Singleton handles them with care and an understanding that extends to all people who share their circumstances. He saw Baby Boy as an extension of the Italian neorealist tradition, which examined real-world struggles in the wake of World War II. Like the masters of that movement, Singleton believed that his characters deserved thoughtful portrayals, even when they fell short of society’s ideas of respectability.

A key to Singleton’s brilliance as a director was his gift for cultivating stars—a quality fully on display in Baby Boy. The chemistry between Gibson and Henson—like that between Jackson and Shakur in Poetic Justice—is a major part of the film’s legacy. At the time of the movie’s release, Gibson was best known for his career as a singer, especially for the 1998 hit single “Sweet Lady”; Singleton took a chance on him and revealed another side of his talent. Henson had only appeared in sitcoms and a few movies, and Baby Boy gave her a major career breakthrough.

Singleton’s eye for great actors—apparent in the extraordinary cast of his debut film—had enduring effects on the culture at large. He was willing to cast hip-hop artists in substantial roles at a time when the music was not as popular as it would later become among mainstream audiences. Casting Ice Cube—who at that point in his career was not far removed from his acrimonious exit from N.W.A, just a few months after the group’s song “Fuck tha Police” had been denounced by the FBI—in Boyz n the Hood was a bold decision that gave the rapper a chance to expand his career beyond music.

Hip-hop was the sound of Singleton’s era, and many of the performers the director featured in the trilogy were his generational peers. He had imagined the role of Jody for Shakur, who was killed in 1996. And long before Snoop Dogg covered the Olympics, Singleton cast him in Baby Boy as Rodney, Yvette’s wicked, wraithlike ex-boyfriend. The lasting impact of Singleton’s trilogy is felt through its ongoing dialogue with hip-hop culture, as evidenced in a generation of artists who grew up watching these films and whose lives are reflected in, and have been shaped by, them. The late rapper Nipsey Hussle—who hailed from the Crenshaw district and didn’t let anyone forget it—once compared his own explorations of Los Angeles to Singleton’s. Compton native Kendrick Lamar’s major-label debut, good kid, m.A.A.d city, echoes Boyz n the Hood with its striking portrait of a teenager on the straight and narrow, trying his hardest to avoid being devoured by his environment. Among the album’s highlights is the song “Poetic Justice,” built around a canny sample of Janet Jackson’s “Any Time, Any Place.” The trilogy’s influence can also be felt in the stories that Leimert Park rapper Dom Kennedy tells in “South Central Love.” The song’s music video, which features a title card reminiscent of the one that opens Poetic Justice, is filled with scenarios that immediately call the trilogy to mind: young people hanging out on front porches, hopping fences to avoid their parents, and having potentially fatal encounters with the police.

Music is not the only medium that has drawn inspiration from Singleton’s films. The video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, set on the West Coast in 1992, recreates imagery seen throughout Boyz n the Hood. Most importantly, a number of the issues addressed in the trilogy—gun violence, police misconduct, gender wars within the Black community—have remained topics of discussion across media. It’s unlikely Singleton believed that any of those problems would be solved during his lifetime, but his trilogy added much-needed nuance to the conversations around them.

In addition to resonating across multiple areas of American culture, Singleton’s trilogy is also a deeply personal project. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the director admitted that the conflicts between the characters in Baby Boy were partly inspired by his own experiences. The tension among Black men and women explored in Poetic Justice was informed by Singleton’s desire to address a problem he felt had worsened during the early nineties. In Boyz n the Hood, Tre’s life mirrors the director’s own: Singleton was also raised by teenage parents who never married and lived separately, but who worked their way into the middle class. Though he attended high school in Pasadena, he was never too far removed from life in South Central. These elements further rooted the films in realism and underlined Singleton’s bond with the neighborhood.

In his final years, Singleton, who died in 2019 at the age of fifty-one after suffering from a stroke, would return to the setting of his trilogy. He executive-produced the 2017 documentary L.A. Burning: The Riots 25 Years Later, revisiting the uprisings he spoke so passionately about during his youth. And he was a cocreator of the crime series Snowfall, a fictional exploration of how the crack epidemic and the war on drugs originated in South Central, helping to create the conditions seen in Boyz n the Hood, Poetic Justice, and Baby Boy.

The memory of South Central—which was officially renamed South Los Angeles in 2003—lives on through Singleton’s trilogy. The movies cemented him as one of the most important directors in the city’s history, foregrounding his passion for the true-to-life stories of Black people in his community. But to simply call them love letters would be insufficient. They are works of advocacy, creating a space for people who still aren’t always given room to be their complex selves. These vital films continue to speak to everyone who grew up just like Singleton did, as well as to generations of audiences who have come to understand South Central through his eyes.

Kinuyo Tanaka Directs: Married to Cinema

Imogen Sara Smith — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 05:42:00 +0000

As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw that leading roles were slipping away from her and faced predictably sexist criticism over her age. Boldly, she set her sights on directing, though there was not a single female director then working in the Japanese film industry—and only one woman, Tazuko Sakane, had previously broken this barrier, directing one narrative feature in 1936, followed by a number of nonfiction educational films. However, the Allied occupation (1945–52) put an emphasis on women’s liberation: Japan’s new constitution and civil code, imposed by the occupiers, established for the first time women’s right to vote and equality under the law, and the postwar years saw the first female members of parliament. Inspired by these advances, Tanaka took the plunge and succeeded in making six features between 1953 and 1962. Behind the camera, she brought to the screen many of the same qualities she possessed as an actor: fearless but unshowy honesty, natural warmth, and a gift for piercing hearts with the simplest means.

Several of the directors Tanaka had worked with actively supported her career transition: Mikio Naruse gave her the chance to observe and assist him on the set of Older Brother, Younger Sister (1953), the closest she came to having any experience or training before her debut; Keisuke Kinoshita and Yasujiro Ozu wrote the screenplays for her first and second films, respectively. A notable exception was the director with whom she remains most associated, Kenji Mizoguchi, who openly opposed and disparaged her ambitions—a disappointing response from a man whose films chronicled the brutal subjugation of Japanese women.

Women’s lives are at the center of almost all of Tanaka’s films—three of which had female writers—but her six directorial efforts are strikingly diverse: they range from delicate romantic comedy to three-hankie tragedy, from raw studies of postwar social problems to lavish, color-saturated historical dramas. Each project was a chance to try something new.

Love Letter: Old Acquaintance

Kinuyo Tanaka’s debut as a director, Love Letter (1953), broached a highly sensitive topic: Japanese men’s sense of shame in the face of the country’s defeat in World War II and subsequent occupation, and their resentment of the many women who, often out of economic necessity, slept with the conquerors. That she would choose such a touchy subject was all the more remarkable given the deeply painful fallout from her 1949 visit to the United States as a goodwill ambassador. The tour itself was a smashing success, but on her return to Japan she was savaged by the press for appearing in the height of Americanized glamour, sporting sunglasses and furs and blowing kisses to the crowd. Mortified by the charge that she had betrayed her country, she retreated into a period of isolation and severe depression. Yet Love Letter, released the year after the occupation ended, shows a nation scrambling for American magazines, fashions, and dollars, even while nursing feelings of humiliation and loss.

This is the only one of Tanaka’s films to center on a male protagonist, Reikichi, a well-educated veteran unable to find work after the war. He is played by Masayuki Mori, who had starred with Tanaka in Kenji Mizoguchi’s feudal-era ghost story Ugetsu, released the same year. It is a bit of a shock to see this elegant matinee idol, in the opening scene of Love Letter, hanging laundry in a poky little apartment. A chance meeting with an old friend results in an unexpected job: writing letters in English for Japanese women—mostly sex workers, it is implied—to send to American soldiers who have returned home. Couched as flowery love messages, these are really pleas for cash. Reikichi is tolerant enough, until Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga), the long-lost love he has been searching for, turns up as a client.

The reunion between the two is perhaps the most striking moment in the film, illustrating Tanaka’s restrained treatment of melodrama and her instinct for the cinematic possibilities of everyday surroundings. They meet on a crowded railway platform; just as they come face-to-face, the door of a train slides shut, framing them for a moment in the window. Only then do we realize that the camera has moved into a passenger car, and as the train moves off it carries us, in a gliding movement, into an idyllic flashback of Reikichi and Michiko’s childhood friendship.

Love Letter captures a postwar Tokyo bustling with hectic vitality. When the production filmed in the streets, press photographers swarmed, excited by the novelty of a female director. The film, which played at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954, was well received by both audiences and critics (though the latter often patronizingly gave credit to Tanaka’s male collaborators). The story sensitively argues that the way forward lies in responsibility and forgiveness, not victimhood, and balances the wounds of the war with budding hope for renewal and second chances.

The Moon Has Risen: Poetry by the Numbers

A series of static shots sets the scene, framing temples and pagodas nestled in a tranquil park. The camera kneels ninety centimeters above the tatami to observe a family of marriageable daughters headed by a widowed father, played by Chishu Ryu. Is this a film by Yasujiro Ozu? When The Moon Has Risen (1955) came out, many critics treated Ozu as its presiding spirit. Indeed, he had written the screenplay with Ryosuke Saito and had originally planned to direct it himself, but after delays and complications caused by studio and Directors Guild politics, the project wound up at Nikkatsu and became Kinuyo Tanaka’s second directing assignment. There is not a trace of this bumpy genesis in the charming comedy, whose serene surface is gently ruffled by romantic confusion. While presenting a graceful homage to Ozu, Tanaka also animates the film with her own humor and energy.

The upper-class family at the center of the story lives in Nara, an ancient capital of Japan. The formalities and hierarchies they maintain—including the rather feudal treatment of their two servants—suggest timelessness, tradition, and conservatism. Yet reminders of modernity keep cropping up. The Moon Has Risen was partially sponsored by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, which accounts for its recurring references to the wonders of communications technologies. In perhaps the classiest example of product placement ever, a pair of separated lovers exchange coded telegrams that cite poems from The Ten Thousand Leaves (Manyoshu).

Setsuko (Mie Kitahara), the youngest of three sisters, is a vivacious and outspoken young woman sporting stylish Western clothes. Convinced that her reserved older sister Ayako (Yoko Sugi) and the equally shy Amamiya (Ko Mishima) like each other, she becomes determined to set them up, and enlists the help of her friend Shoji (Shoji Yasui) in her clumsy matchmaking schemes. In one comic scene, Setsuko rehearses the willing but clueless family maid, played by the director herself, in how to impersonate her sister on the phone. The small roles that Tanaka took in her first three films are so modest that they feel like inside jokes or gestures of humility.

Meanwhile, as a filmmaker she pays attention to subtle but telling gestures and the minutiae of polite conversations, shot through with oblique hints of hidden feelings. As in the works of Jane Austen, trivial follies give rise to blinding flashes of self-knowledge. In the film’s centerpiece, Setsuko connives to get the reluctant couple alone outdoors on a moonlit night. The long sequence intertwines humor (“Stop the moon!” Setsuko cries at one point, frustrated that her sister is wasting precious minutes indoors) with an ethereal nocturne. As they bathe raptly in the moonlight, all of the characters use the same conventional phrases to describe its beauty; Tanaka tenderly shows how these shared and repeated clichés connect them like joined hands.

Forever a Woman: Portrait of the Artist

With her third film, Kinuyo Tanaka stepped out from under the wings of her mentors and developed a project on her own initiative, collaborating with Sumie Tanaka—no relation to the director—one of Japan’s foremost female screenwriters. A newspaper advertisement for the film trumpeted, “The pathos and intensity of women’s lives have never before been so revealed,” and there is some truth in the promotional hyperbole. Based on the life of tanka poet Fumiko Nakajo, Forever a Woman (1955) depicts the protagonist’s battle with breast cancer with a frankness that would have been unthinkable in Hollywood at the time. It also tells the complicated story of a woman emerging as an artist and a celebrity while contending with infidelity, divorce, motherhood, female friendship, and desire.

In her finely tuned performance, Yumeji Tsukioka doesn’t flinch from Fumiko’s unruly, confused response to her illness and her changed body. After a double mastectomy, she cycles through anger, grief, spurts of gaiety, flirtatiousness, tortured vanity, and interludes of serenity. Near the end, dying in a hospital, Fumiko asks her mother to wash her hair, and on a hot night she lies down next to Otsuki (Ryoji Hayama), a visiting reporter with whom she has formed a bond, and begs him to make love to her. (The journalist character is based on Akira Wakatsuki, who wrote a book about his relationship with Nakajo, The Eternal Breasts, which forms the basis for the film, originally released under the same title.) The film uses wintry locations in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, to ground the tragedy in an everyday realism that makes it hit even harder.

Showing her confidence as a director, Kinuyo Tanaka trimmed dialogue from some scenes, communicating instead through compositions, blocking, and cutting. One of her favorite visual devices is to use sliding doors like horizontal wipes. In The Moon Has Risen, she often places her camera outside the threshold of a room so that the fusumas (traditional interior doors made of white paper) reveal or conceal the scene within. Throughout Forever a Woman, the constant opening and closing of doors, gates, and windows suggests the possibilities that emerge or vanish for the heroine as she moves from a disappointing marriage through an unrealized romance, recognition as a poet, and terminal illness. Even as she stubbornly resists being framed by society in a conventional narrative of gallant martyrdom, she is often visually trapped. Yet her active gaze and her complex relationship to her own image prevent her from becoming an object of pity.

Graced with moments of ordinary kindness, the story refuses to locate meaning in the senselessness of disease, and it builds to an ending that quietly, mercilessly pulverizes your heart. Widely recognized as Kinuyo Tanaka’s masterpiece, Forever a Woman distills the unsentimental humanism of her vision to its essence.

The Wandering Princess: A Royal Pawn

In 1959, the memoirs of Hiro Saga became a best seller in Japan. Born into an aristocratic family, Saga had entered an arranged marriage with the younger brother of the emperor of Manchukuo, a puppet state in Manchuria that was part of the Japanese empire and dominated by Japan’s Kwantung Army. After the fall of Manchukuo and its royal family during the Second World War, she endured imprisonment, separation from her husband, and a grueling trek across northern China before eventually being repatriated to Japan. Daiei snapped up the rights to this autobiography, and the studio cast its biggest star, Machiko Kyo, as the lead in The Wandering Princess (1960).

The project gave Kinuyo Tanaka the chance to return to directing after five years away. It was heavily promoted as a josei-eiga, or woman’s film, for which the director, star, and writer were all female (the screenplay was by Natto Wada, best known for her collaborations with her husband, filmmaker Kon Ichikawa). The Wandering Princess was Tanaka’s first film in widescreen and in color, and her first historical drama, with a large cast and epic narrative. Both it and her second period film, Love Under the Crucifix (1962), view history through the eyes of women whose desires are at odds with their status as powerless pawns. The films employ a tableaulike formality to evoke the stultifying ceremonies of the ruling classes and the rigid strictures that govern the ways women dress and move, giving them scant control over their bodies or their fates.

The film’s main flaw is its flawless heroine, a departure from Machiko Kyo’s sexy image and her association with rebellious modern women and scheming vamps. The script’s willingness to acknowledge Chinese resentment of Japan’s hegemony is undermined by the presentation of Ryuko (Kyo) as a paragon of dutiful, selfless stoicism, dedicated to promoting Sino-Japanese friendship. The most memorable scenes juxtapose her with a very different woman, her sister-in-law, the empress (Atsuko Kindaichi). Described by her husband as “beautiful, but just a doll,” the empress breaks down both mentally and physically during their ordeal, and despite Ryuko’s faithful efforts to care for her, she winds up as a horrifying emblem of human wreckage, crushed in the gears of historical change and discarded like refuse. Even more tragedy is in store for the heroine, as an opening flash-forward warns us. The year after the film’s release, however, Saga was finally reunited with her husband, and she lived with him in China until her death in 1987.

Girls of the Night: Street Without Shame

In several of her most celebrated films with Kenji Mizoguchi—Women of the Night (1948), The Life of Oharu (1952), Sansho the Bailiff (1954)—Kinuyo Tanaka played women forced into prostitution, plumbing harrowing depths of suffering and degradation. Girls of the Night (1961) can be seen as a kind of sequel or companion piece to Mizoguchi’s final film (in which Tanaka did not appear), Street of Shame (1956), a portrait of the workers in a brothel as a proposed law banning prostitution hangs over their heads; in reality, such a law passed after the film’s release and went into effect in 1957. Tanaka’s film follows former sex workers trying to rebuild their lives in the face of both social and psychological obstacles. Sumie Tanaka’s screenplay, adapted from a 1960 novel by Masako Yana, is both tough-minded and compassionate, free of judgment and of most cinematic clichés about sex work.

The film begins as a collective portrait of women at a reformatory where they have been sent for rehabilitation following arrests for violating the antiprostitution law. They are a motley group, some defiant and rebellious, some physically or emotionally scarred by their lives. Relationships between women—sisters, friends, rivals, mothers and daughters—take on more weight and significance in each of Tanaka’s films, culminating in Girls of the Night, which openly portrays same-sex desire among the female inmates, as well as bullying and fights. Women, in this film, are never merely victims of a patriarchal system: they are complex and contradictory human beings. Gradually, the focus narrows to one inmate, Kuniko (Chisako Hara), who is placed in a succession of jobs. Embittered by the prejudice, exploitation, and hostility she encounters from both men and women, she becomes nostalgic for the “freedom” of the streets. When she finally meets with acceptance and the possibility of love, she feels unworthy of it.

Tanaka returns here to the raw, location-shot, black-and-white realism of Love Letter. Drab, cramped, and dark settings establish the tone for upsetting scenes of violence and cruelty. But the episodic story varies its tones and complicates any simple conclusions. In an intense and subtle performance, Hara makes Kuniko hardened, vulnerable, intelligent, and confused—telling us all we need to know about her past experience and allowing us to cherish the hope that her future life may change after all.

Love Under the Crucifix: Star-Crossed

Set in the late sixteenth century, against the backdrop of warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s campaign to stamp out Christianity in Japan, Love Under the Crucifix opens on a battlefield in flames. But Kinuyo Tanaka’s sole jidai-geki (feudal-era historical drama) is not about armed combat; instead, it focuses on quieter but no less fierce conflicts between austere religious devotion and earthly passion, and between ostentatious, abusive power and the humility and integrity of the tea ceremony.

Released by Shochiku, the film was developed by an independent production company called Ninjin Kurabu (Carrot Club) founded by three actresses—Yoshiko Kuga (who had starred in Love Letter), Keiko Kishi, and Ineko Arima—in an effort to gain more creative control and improve conditions for themselves and other actors. Arima plays Ogin, stepdaughter of the legendary tea master Sen no Rikyu (Ganjiro Nakamura); both are threatened by Hideyoshi, who wants to control Rikyu’s art and possess Ogin’s body. She boldly declares her love for the pious—and married—Christian samurai Ukon (the dreamily handsome Tatsuya Nakadai), who initially rejects her. For women in this period, to express their own desires or deny the lusts of powerful men constituted acts of radical self-determination. Early in the film, Ogin witnesses a gruesome procession taking a peasant woman (Kishi) to be crucified for refusing to comply with a warlord’s customary droit du seigneur. She gazes at the defiant captive with more awe than pity, observing, “She looks so alive!”

Like The Wandering Princess, Tanaka’s final directorial effort combines lush color and largely static compositions to portray a world of passions stifled by strict rules of etiquette, ritual, and hierarchy. Values are displayed through aesthetics, and philosophies reside in objects: a cross on a chain, the pattern of a kimono, the design of a garden, or the solid-gold tea room commissioned by Hideyoshi, a grotesque mockery of the simplicity at the heart of the tea ceremony. But in a key scene, all the elaborate artifice, and the intangible structures of religion and politics, are dissolved by the elements of blood, rain, fire, and human love.

Kinuyo Tanaka, who never married or had children, liked to say that she had chosen to marry cinema. She continued acting until the year before her death, in 1977, but the films she directed were overlooked until well into the twenty-first century. Finally accessible, they have lost none of their passion and largeness of spirit, which came from the woman behind the camera.

Far from Home: Three Noirs by Jacques Tourneur

Imogen Sara Smith — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 05:54:00 +0000

During the evening rush on a busy Los Angeles boulevard, a man steps into a news-vendor’s stall and scans the out-of-town papers section, where journals offer balm for homesick travelers and transplants. But his hometown, Evanston, Illinois, is missing—no call for it, the vendor says dismissively, before switching on the lights against the deepening dusk. The stranger flinches in the sudden glare, his reaction underscored by a sharp plink of strings on the soundtrack. He warily eyes a police car driving past. Up and down the avenue, neon bar signs bloom, writing their promises of pleasure and escape on the darkness in shimmering cursive, as the lush title ballad of Nightfall swells. This precredit scene distills the essence of Jacques Tourneur’s touch as a director: how he suffuses ordinary moments with an atmosphere of poetry, melancholy, and dread.

Tourneur spent his life in between his native France and America, and many of his best films follow people traveling to unfamiliar places or encountering the foreign at home. These themes are especially strong in three noir films he directed, currently playing on the Criterion Channel. Made nearly a decade apart, Out of the Past (1947) and Nightfall (1956) both open with a man living under a false name, on the run from something that happened in a different place and time. In Berlin Express (1948), a group of travelers in postwar Germany venture into a profoundly unsettled and unsettling landscape.

Whether they are real locations or studio sets, the places in these films are never merely backdrops; they envelop and influence the characters. Tourneur was sensitive and exacting about the lighting of scenes: one might be hearing him speak when the protagonist of Nightfall describes how often he has watched the day’s end from the window of his furnished room: “I know how every shadow falls.” The director also makes us aware of what is unseen and unheard, the paradoxical presence of absence: the “friendly” darkness of Cat People (1942), or the silence of the “Soundless Shore” in Circle of Danger (1951), where an American visitor takes in the eerie stillness beside a Scottish loch and observes, “It’s as if everything is waiting.”

Berlin Express: Displaced Persons

Filmed in 1947, Berlin Express was the first Hollywood feature to be made in Europe after the war, amid the ruins of Frankfurt and Berlin, which were still under Allied occupation. The film opens in Paris, where Tourneur was born in 1904. His father, Maurice Tourneur, was a renowned director during the silent era who worked in the United States between 1914 and 1928. Jacques joined him there at age ten, going to school first in New York and then in California. When Maurice went back to Europe, Jacques went along and worked for his father as an assistant and editor; he directed his first three films in France before returning to Hollywood in the mid-1930s. There, he toiled for a number of years in second-unit work, shorts, and B-movies before his breakthrough, Cat People, made for producer Val Lewton at RKO—a surprise hit that revolves around the troubled marriage between an American man and a European woman. Though Tourneur spoke English with little or no accent, everyone who knew him seems to have agreed that he remained at heart a Frenchman. He was a quiet man, generally popular with actors and crews for his calm temper; Bert Granet, the producer of Berlin Express, said he “kept so much inside of him,” and revealed little about his feelings. (“You just sit there and stay inside yourself,” Kirk Douglas’s character tells Robert Mitchum’s in Out of the Past; another remarks, “You sure are a secret man.”)

Granet developed the story for Berlin Express with Curt Siodmak—a German Jewish émigré—and Harold Medford. It is a spy thriller that, with its central train journey, recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940). The MacGuffin propelling the story is the Paris-to-Berlin journey of Dr. Heinrich Bernhardt (Paul Lukas), on a sketchily defined mission to reunify Germany—then divided between the Allied powers—a goal that is threatened by a resurgent pro-Nazi “underground” trying to assassinate him. The main characters are schematic national archetypes representing the four Allied powers: a straight-shooting American, Robert Lindley (Robert Ryan); a suave Frenchman (Charles Korvin); a jolly, nattering Englishman (Robert Coote); and a humorless Russian spouting Soviet propaganda (Roman Toporow). Yet the film is deepened and darkened primarily by two things: the astounding footage of the bombed cities, and the uneasy mood that Tourneur instills.

Lucienne (Merle Oberon), Dr. Bernhardt’s secretary, tells Lindley that Europeans are more used to living in a state of “fear, insecurity, suspicion of everyone and everything.” Later, she adds, “Don’t you see, there is nothing one can count on. No one’s address is dependable.” It is Tourneur who makes these words real—far more so than Oberon, who unfortunately essays a French accent as flimsy as a poorly forged passport. (In the Paris scenes, people speak un-subtitled French, perhaps in tribute to the director’s birthplace.) The plot is filled with decoys, doubles, and deception, and Tourneur brings out not a Hitchcockian tone of wit and surprise, but a mournful awareness that a world where no one can be trusted, where nothing is what it seems, is profoundly lonely and disorienting.

Cinematographer Lucien Ballard, who was married to Oberon, worked with Tourneur to make the ruins disturbingly beautiful, revealing how, in a few short years, modern urban centers had been reduced to archaic skeletons. The train that gives the film its title also has a sinister allure, breathing luminous steam into the black night. Early on, the camera glides alongside the cars, moving from window to window as the characters are introduced, each in his or her own isolating frame. The film’s most remarkable shot shows two characters talking in a compartment while, through the window behind them, we see an attack taking place in the next compartment, reflected in miniature on the window of a train on another track. It is a fancy composition, but it compresses into one frame the sense of how reality and illusion, closeness and distance, can become confused when all reliable markers are dissolved.

Top of page: Out of the Past; above: Berlin Express

The scenes that hit hardest involve a coerced betrayal of an old friend, and a spy disguised as a clown from one of Frankfurt’s illegal, “off limits” nightclubs. Tourneur said that he had a “complex” about clowns: “They’re characters out of a nightmare . . . What’s sadder than a clown all made up?” This figure of false fun, with a painted grin and frightened eyes, is chased through a rubble field at night, lurching bloody and wounded, hiding in the tracery of shattered buildings. The people living in this shell of a town peddle personal belongings out of suitcases to survive, and post notices seeking missing loved ones. They have not left home but become strangers and refugees in their own city.

Out of the Past: Drifting and Dreaming

“You’ve been a lot of places, haven’t you?”
“One too many.”
“Which did you like the best?”
“This one right here.”
“I bet you say that to all the places.”

The very first shot in Out of the Past is of a signpost with arrows listing the distances to various destinations; the camera then places us in an open-top convertible, behind a driver in a black overcoat and fedora, as he motors into a small town in the Sierra Nevadas. A few scenes later, Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) has the above exchange with his girlfriend, Ann (Virginia Huston), as they laze beside a pristine lake under towering peaks. Jeff imagines settling down with Ann in a lakeside cabin and never leaving, but this fantasy is as fleeting as the light scattering over the water.

Out of the Past never stays in one location for long. Jeff drifts from place to place like a sleeper through a series of fitful dreams. The film opens in Bridgeport, a tiny outpost in the mountains with a gas station and a diner, a few stark houses, and a white clapboard church shining like bone in the hard winter sun. In flashbacks, as Jeff tells Ann about his former life as a private detective and how he was hired to find a rich gambler’s runaway mistress, we travel to New York—a penthouse apartment, a smoky Harlem jazz club, a city without daylight—and to Acapulco, where Jeff found the missing woman, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer). Then on to Lake Tahoe, where a serene view of crystalline waters is the spoils of the gambler’s dirty deals, and to San Francisco, where boogie-woogie piano plays in dim-lit apartments and doomed men mix martinis on terraces with views of headlights crawling across the Bay Bridge.

Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca was one of the supreme masters of noir lighting, as he established in the deliriously expressionist Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). Here, the Ansel Adams–like panoramas that open the film shrink down to shots of Jeff and Ann meeting in the swamps at night, their bodies caught in a web of shadows from bare, jagged branches. A simple walk down a hall is transformed into nearly abstract, rhythmic patterns of dark and light. In his superb study Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall, Chris Fujiwara cites an early childhood memory that seems a perfect rosebud for the director’s use of chiaroscuro lighting: on Christmas Eve his parents put his presents in a large, spooky room that he had to approach via a pitch-black hallway, where he struggled between desire and fear, the darkness of the passage and the distant brightness of the gifts that took on “a phantom-like appearance.”

In the long central flashback narrated by Jeff, a kind of film-within-a-film, Kathie is repeatedly associated with light and shadow—he describes her walking in “out of the sun” or “out of the moonlight” or “in the headlights”—as if she were a creature of pure celluloid. Kathie is the deadliest of all femmes fatales because she is the most enchanting, and her romance with Jeff is magical, far from the usual spectacle of a temptress reeling in a chump. True, their first kiss is enmeshed in black fishing nets on a beach (one of a series of marine references, along with a bar called La Mar Azul—the Blue Sea—characters named Fisher and Eels, and a hoodlum who is yanked to his death by a fishing line). But Jeff knows, at least on some level, that he is throwing his life away as he falls into Kathie’s embrace, murmuring, “Baby, I don’t care.” Their Mexican idyll—a rhapsody of sunstruck plazas and dim cantinas, moonlit beaches and rainswept bungalows—floats in the unreality of being in a foreign land. “I don’t know what we were waiting for,” Jeff muses. “Maybe we thought the world would end. Maybe we thought it was all a dream.”

Kathie is different in each place where she appears, connecting the film’s peripatetic structure with its themes of disillusionment and betrayal. In Mexico she is girlish, laughing, luminous in white. In Tahoe, she looks pinched and wary; in San Francisco she is ravishing in an off-the-shoulder black gown and upswept hair, but the fear and desperate lies are visible just under the glistening surface of her beauty. At the end, she is severe in a grey tailored suit and wimple-like head covering, gloating that she is finally running the show. Out of the Past’s plot is famously convoluted, filled with doubles and double-crosses—during the filming, Mitchum cracked to Jane Greer, “Don’t tell anyone, but I think they lost three pages in mimeo.” But everything flows like music. The consistent sound of the dialogue—every line a wisecrack, an aphorism, or a morsel of pulp poetry—is all the more remarkable given that the script, though solely credited to Daniel Mainwaring, had uncredited contributions by James M. Cain and Frank Fenton—the latter contributing many of the best lines.

Out of the Past

That sound is, above all, Robert Mitchum’s: the whole film is keyed to his rhythm, pacing, and lyricism, his way of delivering his lines behind the beat. He was the perfect actor for Tourneur, who routinely instructed performers to speak more softly and underplay. In Out of the Past, this subdued quality combines with intense stylization to create something effortlessly sublime. Received on its release as just another hard-boiled detective story, it has come to be revered as, arguably, the definitive film noir. The whole movie sustains a laid-back high, like a wee-hours jam session, as if the whole thing were dreamed some winter night in “a little joint on Fifty-Sixth Street.”

But in the end, no amount of wit and grace can undo the consequences of a fatal mistake. The world doesn’t end, just the dream. As Jeff tells Kathie, “There’s no place left to go.”

Nightfall: Wanted Man

“You change inside,” Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) says of being on the run. He is the man who searched the Home Town Papers for Evanston, and who has memorized how the dying light looks from his window. His name is not really Jim Vanning. Fleeing after an incident during a camping trip in Wyoming—the harrowing nature of which emerges only halfway through the film—he has drifted through New Orleans, Dallas, and now Los Angeles, taking different names and jobs. Innocent or guilty does not matter; he has become a fugitive in his soul, a man who instinctively shrinks from the light and hunches his shoulders at the sight of a police car.

Nightfall is based on a novel by noir master David Goodis, which provides its unabashedly far-fetched plot and tone of hunted, haunted anxiety. Stirling Silliphant, who wrote the screenplay, cocreated the television series Naked City, Perry Mason, and Route 66—the last of which is a paean to rootless wandering, an anthology show built around two young men’s aimless road trip through America. Nightfall’s most famous line of dialogue plays on the glamour of the fugitive, when Marie (Anne Bancroft) tells Jim, “You’re the most wanted man I know.” He is being pursued both by a pair of violent bank robbers who believe he has their loot, and by an insurance detective, Fraser (James Gregory), who has surveilled him so long and closely that he feels he has come to truly know his quarry, almost to be living his life. On a warm evening, at the start of the film, Fraser approaches Vanning at a bus stop and asks for a light; they talk about tropical islands, the detective’s generic fantasy of escape to a remote paradise running up against Jim’s actual experience fighting on Okinawa.

Nightfall

Much later, in the snowy outback of Wyoming, John (Brian Keith), one of the robbers, explains that with his share of the stolen money he plans to buy a boat and sail away to find his own island, where he will live the rest of his life in peace. It is the same dream Jeff Bailey indulged in, of settling down in a cabin by a lake: a place where the past will never find him. The odd-couple pairing of the cerebral, slightly squeamish John and the sniggering, sadistic Red (Rudy Bond), whose partner describes him as “a kind of adult delinquent,” is one of the film’s best features. Their contempt for each other is a ticking time bomb.

Nightfall reverses the trajectory of Out of the Past, not only opening in the city and then moving to the wilderness but beginning as pure noir and gradually lightening in tone, from a scene of torture in an oil field at night to a comically disrupted fashion show. It is ultimately a story about luck, bad and good, more than guilt or fate.

The best scene comes near the beginning, when Jim meets Marie by chance in a chic bar, where she strikes up a conversation by claiming to have forgotten her wallet and asking to borrow five dollars. Is she on the level, or setting him up for a betrayal? Their banter is a cocktail of wariness and weariness, cynicism with a dash of hope. “You’ve told me so little about yourself, you might be any one of several people,” Marie says to Jim—who has indeed been several people. The scene is pure Tourneur because it is awash in the uncertain atmosphere of twilight. It is all seductive ambiguity, veiled hints of risk and possibility. This is the best time: when light merges into dark and desire into fear, when the evening might go anywhere.

On Restoration and Repair: A Conversation with Ja’Tovia Gary

Beandrea July — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:55:00 +0000

“The wig has a name. The wig’s name is Pam.”

I was not even a little surprised to hear that Dallas-born filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary had given a name to the bouncy brown bob she wears in her film The Giverny Document (2019). The wig takes on a presence of its own, allowing Gary to embody a talk-show-host persona as she stops Black women on the streets of Harlem to ask, “Do you feel safe?” This character dons a navy blue, military-style jacket with gold buttons (think Michael Jackson) and speaks with a palpable warmth as she extends her mic to passersby. The multi-award-winning film traverses between Harlem and a very different location—the lush gardens of Giverny, France, where Gary held the Terra Foundation Summer Artist Residency in 2016. In the scenes shot in this Edenic sanctuary, Gary plays the Negress, wandering in an easy floral dress—and sometimes in Eve-like nudity. She is bold, curious, and unashamed, certain of her right to be there just as she is. In both settings, Gary is channeling someone who isn’t quite herself but somehow reveals an essential part of who she is: “I think both the character of the Negress in the Garden and the Woman on the Street who’s wearing Pam—those are iterations of myself in some regard,” Gary tells me.

The Criterion Channel is now presenting a showcase of Gary’s work featuring three of her films. Alongside The Giverny Document are Quiet as It’s Kept (2023), her pulsating call-and-response tribute to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and An Ecstatic Experience (2015), which explores the meaning of liberation through testimonies of Black women. Gary’s films blend animation—created through handmade techniques applied directly to film stock—with Kuleshov-style montage and audiovisual citations from nontraditional archives like the internet. Though she delights in abstraction and nonlinear form, Gary doesn’t love being labeled an “experimental filmmaker.” “If experimental wasn’t marginalized and diminished, I would have no problem being called experimental,” she says when we speak in February. Gary has just gone through an initiation practiced in her longtime religious tradition of Lucumi, which requires her to keep her video off during the interview. Her West African, Yoruba-based religion centers around the veneration of ancestors. “If stories are how we formulate reality—how we make sense of our experience here—but they all follow the same outline,” she continues, “then by changing the form, I’m modeling that you can create a reality radically different from the one you exist under.”

Ja’Tovia, who gave you your name, and what meaning does it hold for you?: My name, which I’ve grown to love over the years—I didn’t always love it—was given to me by my mother, Jocelyn. Everyone in my nuclear family has a name that starts with J.

My mother didn’t really have a meaning for it. She and my father were living in Palermo, Sicily—my dad used to be in the Navy. The story goes that they knew someone named Octavio, and—you know how Black people are—they decided to add the “Ja” and make it Ja’Tovia.

My theater teacher at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas—Ms. Vicki Washington—gave me a meaning for the name: “she who will not be deterred.” And I hang on to that.

You grew up in the Pentecostal church. Do you think there’s a connection between that background and performance? People talk about answering the call to ministry—did theater feel like your version of that?: What I’m doing right now may be a version of that. When I was a young person, theater was more about self-regulating. That was before I even understood what that meant. I just knew that when I got onstage and expressed myself physically and creatively through performance, I felt better. I felt better in my body and about who I was. It quieted my mind and gave me an outlet. Having access to arts education and the stage—and these incredible instructors and mother figures—really was lifesaving.

How did you make the transition from being a student at Booker T. Washington and acting to being interested in making films?: I made my first film on VHS while I was at Booker T. Washington. I was probably sixteen or seventeen. I had this boyfriend at another school—Mrs. Washington is actually his mother—and we were just two young artists. That first film was a kind of love letter to him. I got all my friends together. At that school everyone is extremely talented—dancers, singers, visual artists, musicians. People recited poetry, people sang. It was kind of a precursor to this nontraditional, nonlinear narrative structure in my work. It was a mosaic.

I didn’t start taking cinema seriously until I moved to New York and was pursuing acting. I started running into limitations around representation and autonomy in the roles I was being asked to audition for. Not all of them were disturbing, but enough of them made me feel that acting wasn’t giving me the freedom I needed.

At the same time I became interested in documentary and history. I was watching all kinds of historical documentaries—about Marcus Garvey, about Josephine Baker, about political issues. Eventually I returned to school and studied Africana Studies and documentary film production. It became a way to bring together my curiosity about Black culture and history with storytelling.

Top of page: The Giverny Document; above: Quiet as It’s Kept

I want to get into the films that are on Criterion. I’d like to start with Quiet as It’s Kept, especially since yesterday was Toni Morrison’s birthday.: Originally the idea of exploring Toni Morrison cinematically was presented to me by a critic who wanted to commission it for a show. I usually don’t do commissions because I don’t like having a boss. But I loved the idea of thinking through Morrison cinematically. We used The Bluest Eye, which is one of my favorite texts, as a point of departure. I wasn’t interested in adapting it. I wanted to be in conversation with it. If Morrison were here, this film would be what I’d say to her about that book from my perspective as a Southern Black millennial queer woman.

You’ve said editing is where you make the film.: Yes, I remember going to the Flaherty Seminar when Christopher Harris and Cauleen Smith were speaking. Someone asked why they edit their own films, and they said the edit is where we make the film. I almost screamed when they said it.

Everybody’s process and practice is their own and deserves consideration, but for me, the edit is where the thing called filmmaking occurs. The edit is like writing. I wouldn’t hand my notes to another writer to assemble them into a text. The edit is the writing.

When you were interviewing people on the street in Harlem wearing the wig in The Giverny Document, were you consciously creating a character?: Yes. Something shifts when I put on the wig. I’m channeling talk-show culture from the 1990s—Rolonda Watts, Oprah, Phil Donahue, even Ricki Lake. Talk shows were an important cultural commons. I feel talk shows are very much within a documentary tradition. They revealed the desires and anxieties of the collective. So I wanted to think about the various modes that documentary has gone through over the ages. One of those modes is vox populi, voice of the people. You can sometimes get to a really intimate and revelatory moment with a stranger on the street.

The Giverny Document

The interviews in The Giverny Document were really moving to me as a Black woman who’s experienced some of the things that your woman-on-the-street interviews revealed. Did you have a lot more interviews than you included in the film?: Every person who stopped, I included. It wasn’t just about one or two, it was about the chorus. Saidiya Hartman talks about how the chorus can provide a mosaic of the reality that we live in, especially if the chorus is voices that are historically silenced. If anything, the experiment feels incomplete because I didn’t encounter transwomen during filming. If we really want to talk about safety, that’s who we need to be talking to.

Why do you think that is?: I think there are many factors. My goal when I make these films is for someone to see them a hundred years from now and say this is resonant and applicable or restorative for me, but I think the timing was key. And I think it’s so densely layered that even though it does not reflect everyone’s lived experience, there are pieces, moments, and feelings that emerge that people can latch on to. It feels like a poem in a way, and you don’t understand every line of the poem, but maybe there’s this one stanza or this one couplet that does something for you.

Your films also feature a technique that involves etching directly onto 16 mm film.: So, direct animation is the overarching name of several techniques. Etching is one of the techniques; you are etching directly into the surface of the film, into the emulsion. Sometimes people are painting onto the surface of the film, or you are masking out certain parts of the film. It’s basically hand-processing techniques. Some people, like Stan Brakhage and Len Lye, call this cameraless filmmaking. I had a really interesting professor in graduate school called Michel Negroponte, and he told me that I was going to need to supplement my education, that I was going to need to use New York City as my other classroom. And I found a place in Brooklyn called Mono No Aware. This is where I began to learn about these techniques and incorporate them into my practice. For me, the handmade element is important. I consider the films to be objects as well as experiences. There’s a sculptural element. I am not one of those filmmakers who’s always chasing the latest and greatest gadget, the sharpest camera. I’m absolutely consumed with the archive and small-gauge filmmaking and hand-processing. I think the intimacy that is created while you are making something can be transmitted, so it’s important for me to hold on to that and to spend that time creating that relationship with the material. It takes a really long time to etch, and that’s where the magic is stored.

An Ecstatic Experience

You’ve also talked about Soviet montage theory as an influence.: Yes, the Kuleshov effect. When you place one image next to another, meaning emerges. If you change one image, the meaning changes. They are these psychological landscapes that are being painted. So I find this technique and the various ways that montages can be assembled extremely helpful. When I’m trying to paint an interior picture for a viewer, there’s so much meaning that can be made just by placing images next to one another. John Akomfrah and Arthur Jafa would call this “affective proximity.” What are you feeling emotionally? What are you feeling psychologically? Not just: what happens next in the narrative?

On the topic of citing internet archives, Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message is one of the most well-known examples of films that do this. But your film An Ecstatic Experience actually came out a couple years earlier.: You know how many people say, “Oh, you were inspired by Arthur Jafa”? Everyone wants to make Arthur Jafa my dad, and I love AJ. He hates when I call him Uncle, but this is my southern uncle. We’re from the same region of the country. We come from very similar traditions, so it's no wonder that there are threads that are similar. But I’ve had multiple curators—usually they’re white men, sometimes they are Black people—say “you’re very much in this tradition of Arthur Jafa.” It’s erasure. It’s all love and respect to my uncle. I’ll forever give him his praises. He is my elder. I have learned a lot from him. He’s given me permission to speak very freely about my practice and to be my full self, which is why I don’t feel no type of way saying this: I did not get my ideas around montage editing from his film.

How do you listen for what a particular piece is asking of you while you’re making it?: I can’t even tell you how I listen. I just know that it is a listening. Initially, I’m working with ideas and thoughts and feelings that I’m scribbling down, and then I start culling images. If we’re talking about Quiet as It’s Kept, I knew that I wanted Toni Morrison’s voice in there somehow. And again, to shout out Michel Negroponte, he would always say to me, “Just put it on the timeline.” In your editing software, just start putting things there. Beginning is hard, but if you just start putting things down, like a painter would begin to put a stroke down or make a mark, then you begin to see things next to one another. So I’m listening, I’m watching, and I’m also reading while I’m making. And this is something that I tell younger filmmakers: “Don’t just go to film school. What do you know about the world?”

As a Black woman, I feel nourished by your films. There’s a caring that happens. I may not understand everything, but I know I can watch this and I’m not going to be harmed by it. And I think that’s really powerful, and something more filmmakers ought to think about.: We are deeply invested in care. These are restorative gestures. These are healing gestures. Some things are going to be uncomfortable, but we’re not trying to break you. We’re destabilized only in that we have to rip off the veil. We have to tell the truth straight. We’re operating in the Black feminist tradition, and that’s one of restoration and repair.

Next Stop: The Criterion Mobile Closet in Portland, Oregon

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:26:00 +0000

Since its debut in 2024 at the New York Film Festival, the Criterion Mobile Closet has made wildly successful stops in cities across the United States and Canada. For our first trip this year, in partnership with PAM CUT, Criterion is bringing the Mobile Closet to Portland, Oregon, in May—and visitors can look forward to some exciting additional programming, including a series of screenings and a live recording of Adventures in Moviegoing with Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the actors, writers, and cocreators behind Portlandia. Read on for more details!

May 29–31: Criterion x PAM CUT

Location

SW Madison Street and South Park Blocks, across the street from the Portland Art Museum’s main entrance

Opening Hours

Friday, May 29: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Saturday, May 30: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Sunday, May 31: 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Stocked with more than 1,700 of the greatest films from around the world, the Criterion Collection Closet may offer more cinematic inspiration per square foot than any other place on the planet. Filmmakers, stars, and creative luminaries of all kinds come to Criterion to champion their favorite films in our popular Criterion Closet Picks video series.

Since we started taking the Closet out on the road, film lovers across the country have joined us to explore the collection and make their own Closet videos. Portland will be our eighth stop.

If you’re planning to join us in Portland, please sign up here to get important real-time updates on location, the opening and closing of our line, logistics, etc.

Please note: signing up here does not guarantee entry to our Mobile Closet experience.

Additional Programming

PAM CUT will present three films programmed by Criterion: Monterey Pop (May 23), Paris Is Burning (May 24), and Something Wild (May 30).

On Sunday, May 31, at 7 p.m., Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein will join us for a live recording of the Criterion Channel original series Adventures in Moviegoing. In this intimate conversation, the longtime collaborators will reflect on how they came to love cinema and on the movies that inspire them.

Buy tickets here!

Enjoy this teaser for our weekend in Portland!

Getting to the Mobile Closet

Public Transportation: Multiple bus, streetcar, and MAX light-rail lines will drop you off within a few short blocks of the museum. Use TriMet’s Trip Planner to map out the best transit route from your location.

Parking: Ample paid parking is available within a few blocks of the museum, including street parking, surface lots, and parking garages.

How It Works

The Criterion Closet is stocked with every in-print edition from the Criterion Collection, including box sets, as well as all in-print releases from our Eclipse and Criterion Premieres lines.
The Mobile Closet will be open to the general public until we reach capacity for the day.
There is currently no reservation or advance ticketing system in place; just show up at the location at the designated time and take your place in line. Out of respect for the communities we visit, we thank you for arriving just before we form the line. Up to four people can share a Closet visit, so bring your friends or make friends in line! (We encourage group visits.)
As long as supplies last, you’ll receive a Criterion tote bag and a printed pocket guide to the Criterion Collection.
Use the pocket guide to find films you love from the Collection. The numbered order of the films in the guide matches the order of the films in the Closet so that you can easily find what you’re looking for once inside.
If you don’t know what to choose, don’t worry! Just tell us about a film or filmmaker you love, and we’ll help you find something that fits you.
Although we’ll have our camera rolling throughout the Closet visit, there’s absolutely no pressure to perform or talk about your selections. Your experience in the Closet is yours to create!
If you would like to film or photograph your visit on your own camera or phone, you’re welcome to use our wall mount.
Each Closet visit will last three minutes. Once the clock starts (spoiler: it’s when you enter!), you’ll have that time to explore the collection or talk about your selections. Don’t worry—the Criterion Closet team is there to help you find what you’re looking for, and if all you want to do is look around, that’s okay too!
No purchase is required, but you are able to buy up to three items with our special Mobile Closet discount of 40 percent off. A limited amount of Criterion merch may also be available for purchase at the time of your visit. We accept credit cards only.
At the end of every Closet visit, we take a Polaroid of our visitors with their selections, which will be yours to keep as a souvenir along with the tote bag and guide to the Collection, while supplies last.
You might be featured on our social feeds, so keep an eye out and be sure to follow us on social media: Instagram, X, and Facebook.

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X: @criterion
Facebook: @CriterionCollection

FAQ

Point Blank: A Dream of Full-Color Noir

Geoff Dyer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:52:00 +0000

It’s all a bit confusing. Point Blank is based on a novel called The Hunter by Richard Stark, one of several pseudonyms adopted by Donald E. Westlake. The book was republished as Payback in 1999 to tie in with a film adaptation starring Mel Gibson, while the 2019 movie directed by Joe Lynch is a remake of a 2010 French film, À bout portant, directed by Fred Cavayé and retitled Point Blank for its English-language release. Oh, and aside from the title, Bruce Springsteen’s song “Point Blank” has nothing to do with John Boorman’s 1967 film.

The protagonist of The Hunter is called Parker. Of all the changes made to the original script—“appalling,” in Boorman’s opinion, “a collection of clichés,” he told Lee Marvin when they first met; “a piece of shit,” Marvin agreed—none was more fundamental than the switch from Parker to Walker. The hunter, one who hunts, was Parker, one who parks. Marvin does a bit of parking, outside Lynne’s LA apartment building, for example, though we never actually see him park, which is fine because parking can be as difficult to make interesting on film as it is sometimes difficult to do in real life, and if the scene in which Walker takes the convertible for a punishing test-drive from John Stegman’s car lot is anything to go by it’s likely that parking in a tight spot will result in severe damage to any vehicles in the vicinity. So, no parking but plenty of walking. “Walking is a form of thinking,” writes John Berger in Pig Earth, and Walker is always thinking. Even when he’s not walking—just sitting or standing—he’s thinking, and what he’s thinking about is getting his money back. What does he want? His money. What does he really want? I really want my money, he says after a moment of puzzled reflection, really putting the dead in deadpan, but the more he repeats this answer the less convincing it sounds, or the more the quest for his ninety-three thousand takes on the financially incalculable quality of deeper existential questions. It was Pinter rather than Beckett who influenced the “laconic and oblique dialogue” of the rewritten script, but Walker might as well have said he was waiting for Godot, even if he’s not waiting but walking. If walking is a form of thinking it might also be a form of not waiting, the opposite of waiting, and although Walker is so determined to get his money as to seem possessed by a kind of somnambulistic patience, it would be absurd if he’d been called Waiter. So that’s what Walker wants—his money—and does: walks.

When we think of a painting we see it whole in our mind’s eye. Films are remembered synecdochically, a few images or scenes standing in for the unfolding whole. Point Blank imprints itself in memory with the sequence of the aptly named Walker walking along the aptly named walkway after arriving at LAX, propelled by the percussive beat of his brogues. The camera is waist-high, looking up at him as he looks straight ahead, walking through the extreme anamorphic perspective of the walkway. Walking on film is not just walking, it’s also acting, one of the ways in which psychology is manifested externally. So there’s a lot going on in this walk, and much of that lot involves reducing everything about the walk—thinking, psychology—to nothing but walking. Even to say he’s thinking about walking is to overburden what he’s doing with cognition. He’s walking briskly, not dawdling, but neither is he hurrying.

Arriving at LAX I enjoy walking this same walk, but it’s always compromised by my casual clothes, my soundless sneakers, and—worse still—the fact that I’m usually dragging a wheelie suitcase. I mention this because Walker is luggage-free, which is odd given the number of costume changes he’ll make during his highly eventful sojourn in Los Angeles. This means either that he’s checked a bag and will have to wait at the luggage carousel (which seems out of character) or that, in addition to taking down all the people standing between him and his money, he’ll have to go clothes shopping on Rodeo Drive (even more out of character). The relentless clacking of brogues continues on the soundtrack even after Walker’s stopped walking and started driving, after he’s parked and waiting for Lynne to get home. When she does he bursts in behind her—unannounced, to put it mildly—storms into the bedroom, and shoots Mal where he lies, before realizing that he’s been blasting away, impotently, at an empty bed.

By now we realize what’s going on. Namely, that the young English director has got so much cinema in him he’s going to spike this hard-boiled thriller with all the stuff he’s absorbed from other films, other directors, often European (the “fractured structure” of Renoir) but also American (is there a hint of Corman psychedelia as the bottles of liquids and perfumes slosh around in the basin of Lynne’s bathroom after Walker has accidentally smashed a bottle of something that might appropriately be called blue ruin?).

Walker pauses in the vacant aftermath of this strange, oneiric episode. There’s lots of other stuff and people he’ll have to smash up in pursuit of his dough, and this will lead him ultimately not to smashing but to putting a dent in “the Organization.” Unnamed or perhaps named in the same generic way as Walker himself, the Organization suggests that America is, in David Thomson’s phrase, “a complex of organized crime,” but it would be a mistake to think of Marvin as some kind of avenging fallen angel trying to tear down the corrupt and complex edifice of American capitalism. He wants his money.

So on he goes, violently biting his way up the fiduciary food chain, dressed casually only in flashback, back in his early days with Lynne, before she started leaning toward Mal, or when they were doing the Alcatraz heist, but this simple claim is a little hard to sustain since everything from that point on might be a flashback from the moment of his dying, when a movie-dream of impeccably dressed vengeance floats through his head. The suits and sports coats he sports for the rest of the movie are not the best clothes for fighting, especially from a contemporary perspective of hoodies and trainers, but as Boorman explained, Marvin’s clothes were “severely tailored to allow no wrinkle or ruck—they were armor.” There’s no excess cloth on the suits, and after Marvin had contrived to give the novice director the boon of final approval on everything, Boorman shored up this position of extraordinary freedom by shooting a minimum of footage so that even if the studio did try to recut his movie they’d have little filmic cloth to play with. The bond between director and star was tight.

In the catalog to the exhibition of William Eggleston’s photographs that he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, John Szarkowski wrote of how Eggleston had “learned to see in color.” Point Blank was Boorman’s first experience of shooting in color, but to say he was a quick learner is to understate his precocity. Not only did he become instantly fluent in this new language, he developed a grammar of cinematic color as advanced as Antonioni’s in Red Desert or Blow-Up. The clothes, along with everything else—furniture, curtains, cars, sky—are color coordinated, each scene having its particular color harmony, from the silver grays of the early scenes at Lynne’s place to deep blues at the car lot, and on to yellows and browns at Huntley House, where Angie Dickinson (Chris, a seductive Trojan horse) agrees to yield to Mal’s advances. But—and this is essential—there is nothing schematic about this color scheme. It looks so natural that you barely notice it—you notice and respond to the colors, of course, without that response being resisted and therefore diminished by consciousness of directorial insistence. This is all the more remarkable given that all the needs of plot and story—including locations—are subordinated to the film’s aesthetic and rhythm (which, as that walkway sequence makes clear, are inextricably linked). That might be why, watching Point Blank on TV as a seventeen-year-old, I first became dimly—unconsciously, even—aware that there might be more to a movie than what was happening to the people on-screen. The most remarkable thing, though, is that the film never seems overstylized. Why? Because there’s nothing inessential in Boorman’s vision. Devoid of all twists and turns, so little remains of the plot that it can be powered by the director’s saturated aesthetic, a dream of full-color noir.

Devoid of irony and knowingness, it’s also unexpectedly funny. In addition to the Pinteresque dialogue, we have Carroll O’Connor (later to find fame as Archie Bunker in All in the Family) telling Walker—after he’s walloped someone in the kisser with a .44 Magnum—that he’s a very bad man, asking why he’s running around doing things like this. The night before, in that same house up in Curson Canyon, Angie Dickinson (who compels David Thomson to confess that the alphabetical imperatives of his Biographical Dictionary of Film leave him “torn between his duty to everyone from Thorold Dickinson to Zinnemann and the plain fact that Angie is his favorite actress”) starts slapping Walker around in the living room. He has survived getting shot on the Rock, and he stands there and takes it, like a rock. At the end of this sequence (which can be seen on YouTube, with Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” cleverly substituting for the original audio) Angie collapses in the face of—at the feet of—his implacable Walkerness. Next she sets in motion a kind of revolt of the appliances, turning on every mixer, stereo, blender, toaster, and gadget in the modernist house where they’re holing up. Earlier, after she’d helped him get to Mal in the Huntley, she’d left him in the street with the parting words, “You died at Alcatraz, all right.” In this she was echoing Boorman’s suspicion that one of the things that drew Marvin to the role was the fear “that he had lost some essential element of his humanity in [the] brutal experience” of fighting and being wounded as a combat marine in the Pacific. Certainly it’s only as a result of violence that Walker ends up in Chris’s arms, after she decks him with a pool cue. This is not the only time that violence has the quality of quasi-erotic dance. The ballet of assault and battery that erupts backstage at the nightclub—with the projections and blaring funk, it’s like an auto-destructive Happening—comes to a climax with Walker taking deliberate aim and punching one of his assailants between the legs. Mal thinks he’s about to have sex with Chris (at last) only to find that it’s Walker and his naked gun—the white hair encourages this association—inching their hard way toward him under the slinky color-coordinated sheet. That sheet is the only thing he’s wearing as he’s sashayed to the penthouse balcony, forced to acknowledge that, since it barely covers him, it’s not going to serve as much of a parachute. It’s not just a matter of movement, either the actors’ or the camera’s; it’s also about Marvin’s “way of looking”—Thomson again—“when blank hostility faded into hopeless desire.” Which brings us back to his money, to that ninety-three grand he’s determined to get his hands on. The violence might not be a means to get at the money; it might be a way of buying narrative opportunities for inflicting—and being on the receiving end of—hurt. Either way, as he kneels down to rip open the packet of money with his handgun in the concrete trickle of the LA River, he doesn’t seem unduly surprised or concerned to find that it’s stuffed with worthless paper. Maybe he’s relieved because what would he go on to do if he did get his $93K back? That’s a question he’s not going to answer until, with the inevitability of a parable, we end up back where it all started—or ended—at Alcatraz.

Point Blank “did well” when it opened but, in Boorman’s words, “was not a blockbuster.” In France (understandably and a little surprisingly since L’Anglais Boorman had out-Frenched the French in their fascination with the cinematic possibilities of American policiers) it was acclaimed as a masterpiece. That’s been the consensus verdict for a long time now, but—and this is not always the case, as the accumulation of praise can cause masterpieces to suffer a paradoxical softening or erosion—it retains the jagged shock and jolt of its initial execution and release. An unexpected dissenter is Quentin Tarantino, who, in Cinema Speculation, is dismissive of both the film (“After the show-off opening Point Blank settles down into sixties television”) and its star, who acts “like a leafless tree.” Hmm. That is less persuasive and less important than the way Point Blank has embedded itself in movie culture as source, influence, and reference point. Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets has a Point Blank poster on his bedroom wall and, in a more mature incarnation, in Reservoir Dogs, listens as Michael Madsen tells him, “I bet you’re a big Lee Marvin fan, aren’t ya?” I’d always assumed this was a bit of ventriloquism on Tarantino’s part. And even if it’s not and he’s not (a fan) I can’t help but associate the attempted smackdown with that of Angie Dickinson: assault as expression of frustrated love.

This essay © Geoff Dyer. All quotations here, unless otherwise attributed, are from John Boorman’s Adventures of a Suburban Boy.

Sinister Synergies

Max Read — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:42:00 +0000

From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth was steady, markets were mostly stable, and inflation was historically low. The “central problem of depression prevention”—that is, the key aim of economic policymaking since the 1930s—“has been solved,” the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas argued in 2003; dissenters to this rosy view of the dismal science were dismissed as cranks and luddites.

Whoops! Not quite two decades on from the Great Moderation, we find ourselves still stumbling through the social, political, and economic hangover it left behind. Rampant deregulation, accelerating deindustrialization, and an increasingly financialized and computerized economy gave us the GFC, and the vastly unequal economy it left in its wake—channeling gains toward capital, speculators, and a small number of professionals, while leaving workers in the lurch—helped birth the reactionary populism now tearing up global trade.

But how could the economists have known? Well, maybe they should have gone to more movies. In the years between Black Monday and the GFC, Hollywood—itself corporatizing, consolidating, and financializing in a surge of mergers and acquisitions—produced a wave of corporate thrillers driven by anxieties about the economic transformations grinding away in the background of steadily growing GDP. Viewed from the C-suite and the private jet, the economy may have looked fine. But seen from the movie-theater seat and the Blockbuster aisle, it was quite clear something sinister was happening.

Early on in Wall Street (1987), the eager young stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is begging for a second chance from Gordon Gekko, a wily corporate raider played with slimy thrill by Michael Douglas. “What about hard work?” Bud whines in the back of Gekko’s limo. “What about it?” Gekko snarls. “You worked all night researching that dog stock you sold me and look where it got you . . . Wake up pal, will you? If you’re not inside, you’re outside.”

It’s this final line, more than the more famous “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” that typifies the corporate thrillers of the period, which are generally less concerned with specific assessments of capitalism than with quasi-allegorical journeys from the outside to the inside, where our hardworking and ambitious heroes confront the corrupt inner workings at the heart of the modern economy. On Stone’s Wall Street, only old-fashioned fools and dupes try to trade stocks based on sober analysis and within the bounds of securities law; the real advantage is provided by insider trading, straw buying, and other kinds of fraud. Having worked his way to the commanding heights of finance, Bud finds nothing but criminal conspiracy and nonproductive speculation. Bud, the son of an airline shop steward, is troubled by this nihilism. Gekko is not: “I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal,” he tells Bud.

What the movies that followed Wall Street took from it was less Stone’s grounded if shallow critique of financial capitalism and more the texture and structure of Bud’s descent from the grasping outside to the corrupt inside. Throughout the ’90s and 2000s, ambitious young naifs were constantly being inducted on-screen into tony corporate offices eventually revealed as frauds, scams, rackets, and even literal cults. In The Firm (1993), directed by Sydney Pollack, Tom Cruise’s Harvard Law grad—the Bud Fox–ishly named Mitch McDeere—discovers that the boutique Memphis tax-law firm that gave him a Mercedes 300CE convertible and settled his student loans is actually an arm of the Chicago Outfit, prone to killing partners who seem like they might talk. In Antitrust (2001), genius programmer Milo Hoffman (Ryan Phillippe) is recruited to work for the tech giant NURV, whose Bill Gates–like founder Gary Winston (an unsettlingly soft-spoken Tim Robbins) has built an empire out of code stolen from independent programmers murdered by a team of coder–hit men.

Top of post: Wall Street; above: The Firm

That it was Pollack steering the fine studio entertainment of The Firm is fitting, and not just because he had made his own journey to the inside, becoming one of Hollywood’s great company men and a trusted maker of corporate product. The Firm and Antitrust both closely resemble Pollack’s great Three Days of the Condor (1975) in their stories of low-level insiders who stumble upon conspiracies and find themselves surveilled, blackmailed, compromised, and on the run. The difference is that these movies were made in an era where the locus of power, and therefore conspiracy, had moved from the government to the corporation; here, it’s not the CIA you have to worry about but the boardroom. Indeed, in The Firm the feds are largely impotent and easily held at bay; in Antitrust, the justice department is just another tentacle of the NURV octopus.

Maybe just as importantly for fomenting paranoia, the corporation is where all the mystification happens. As the economy becomes all but illegible to ordinary people, the only possible way to explain consolidation and inequality is in terms of mafia-sponsored tax-dodging schemes and techie murder conspiracies. On the one hand, this is all a bit ridiculous; on the other, well, a tech giant built on a foundation of stolen intellectual property? A white-shoe law firm helping clients hide money offshore? Some specific details may be wrong—among other things, no programmer in history has ever looked or sounded like young Ryan Phillippe—but the broad strokes are correct: something rotten is happening within the upper echelons of corporate America.

No movie more explicitly, enjoyably, or flamboyantly articulates this intuition than The Devil’s Advocate (1997), directed by the reliable Hollywood veteran Taylor Hackford and written by Tony Gilroy, who would eventually enter the Disney inner sanctum as the showrunner behind Andor (2022–2025). Here, again, we have a beautiful young working-class go-getter—Keanu Reeves, intermittently affecting an accent as southern defense attorney Kevin Lomax—selected and groomed for success by a powerful older man, in this case a grinning Al Pacino, strutting about in Cuban heels, as the superlawyer John Milton. At Milton’s behest, Lomax moves from Gainesville to Park Avenue; he attends parties with senators and represents millionaires.

The Devil’s Advocate

But something isn’t right. At home, his wife (Charlize Theron) is losing it; when she goes shopping with other lawyers’ wives, their smiles contort demonically, and she dreams of a baby playing with entrails. “I know we’ve got all this money, and it’s supposed to be OK, but it’s not,” she tells Kevin, before slitting her throat in a locked hospital room. In Milton’s concrete penthouse apartment, Lomax confronts his boss, who reveals that the firm is indeed a front, not in this case for an insider trading scheme, or the mafia, or a murder ring, but for literal, actual Satan—Milton himself. No actor in history (for better or worse) has ever had as much fun as Pacino does revealing the truth of his identity, and of the world: “Who, in their right mind,” he asks Lomax, “could possibly deny that the twentieth century was entirely mine?”

Lomax, confronted with this reality, shoots himself in the head, and is transported back to Gainesville, where his adventure in New York is understood as a daydream. Fox, we assume, heads to jail; Hoffman exposes Winston on local cable-access; and McDeere moves back to Cambridge, where surely he’ll never encounter another powerful and menacing sexual-extortion racket.

These are all guys who wanted out, once they’d made it inside. But what about the reverse? If one version of the corporate thriller follows the journey from outside to inside, another draws its narrative tension from movement in the other direction, exploring what happens as you go from the inside to outside, and get left behind as the economy, and the social order, transform.

In Disclosure (1994), Michael Douglas, only seven years removed from Wall Street, trades in his contrast collars for a toothpaste-stained tie as Tom Sanders, a middle manager for the tech company DigiCom on the eve of an important merger. Sanders isn’t a Gekko-style slick—you can tell because his hair is too feathery, too mullet-like—but he’s no slouch, either; he expertly manages a global supply chain manufacturing CD-ROM drives and arrives to his Seattle office at the start of the movie expecting a deserved promotion. But even as he ably surfs the changing tides of globalization, he finds himself caught out by the treachery of gender politics: His new boss Meredith Johnson, a former girlfriend played by Demi Moore, seduces him and then accuses him of assaulting her. Sanders, in turn, accuses her of sexual harassment; as the case unfolds, it becomes clear that more is going on than the simple assignation.

Disclosure is lethally symptomatic of its era, and, as such, lethally prescient about ours: it’s hard to imagine a movie that more efficiently compresses preoccupations about male sexual anxiety in the workplace and a disruptive tech boom dependent on Asian manufacturing into an actually-fairly-entertaining two-hour feature. But at its core, it’s a movie about being left out—thinking you were on the inside and finding yourself on the outside. Sanders is constantly missing meetings, arriving late, finding himself a step behind, catching glimpses of things through the glass walls of the DigiCom office.

Disclosure

Befitting the strangeness of the Great Moderation economy, the stakes are effectively nonexistent—“If this deal goes through, we’ll be rich,” Sanders tells his wife, who responds, “we’re already rich”; when Johnson’s assault accusation is levied, the biggest threat to Sanders isn’t jail or even social sanction, it’s being sent to Austin, Texas—but are cast as existential. DigiCom’s business is about to be supercharged, everyone agrees, and the worst possible outcome is to be left behind. In the movie’s inevitable virtual-reality climax, Sanders becomes something like a ghost, watching helplessly as a wireframe Johnson, oblivious to his existence, goes about deleting exonerating files.

If the conspiratorial structure of corporate-thriller plots reflects an increasingly mystified and stratified U.S. economy, the recurring use of mergers and acquisitions to establish dramatic stakes in these movies—beginning with Wall Street, which uses Gordon Gekko’s hostile takeover of Bluestar Airlines its central dramatic device—should be seen as a reverberation of Hollywood’s own experience of consolidation over the twenty years between Black Monday and the GFC. Sanders’s jockeying for position around corporate restructuring was probably a familiar experience to the executives at Warner Bros who greenlit Disclosure; the studio had merged with Time, Inc., in 1989, in a deal that was nearly thwarted at the last minute by a hostile-takeover bid from Paramount parent conglomerate Gulf+Western.

The rapid consolidation that would follow over the following two decades didn’t necessarily seem like a hazard for the movie industry as either a creative or a business concern; major studios and especially their independent arms enjoyed a remarkable run of critical and commercial success even as their ownership concentrated, and corporate profits soared. In the eighteen months before Disclosure was released, Viacom bought Paramount for $10 billion, and Disney bought Miramax for $60 million; the resulting conglomerates would win the Best Picture Oscars for the next five years and make the executives involved unimaginably rich (while also, notably given Disclosure’s subject matter, ignoring horrifying whispers of serial sexual assault by Miramax’s CEO Harvey Weinstein). No wonder, then, that the DigiCom merger is treated mainly as a threat to Sanders’s personal standing and potential future earnings, rather than the business’s product or profits.

Sanders ultimately clears his name, and despite the internal conspiracy he’s discovered, the merger goes through. He isn’t left behind—yet. But who can say what might happen to DigiCom, over the next decade? Maybe it would be capsized by the tech bubble bursting in 2001, or, given the clear problems with its corporate culture, caught in an accounting scandal like the one that collapsed Enron that same year. Or maybe the disc-drive manufacturing company—a tempting acquisition for a media empire driven by DVD-sales profits—would end up as a subsidiary of one of the Big Six conglomerates that, by the mid-2000s, bankrolled the vast majority of movies seen by Americans.

Where the mergers and acquisitions in Wall Street, Disclosure, and Antitrust—morally ambiguous though they might be—appear as gateways to wealth and success for those movies’ heroes, the plot-driving merger in Michael Clayton (2007) is treated more like a closing bell. The New York–based firm Kenner, Bach & Ledeen is about to merge with an unnamed London counterpart, and the stakes are existential; if the deal doesn’t go through, explains partner Marty Bach—played by none other than Sydney Pollack—“we’ll be selling off the goddamn furniture.” (Pollack might well have been talking to himself: his personal shingle Mirage was one of the three production companies behind Michael Clayton, all of which were shuttered or reduced in size in the years on either side of the film’s release.)

In the movie’s opening scene, an army of lawyers gather in a conference room in an office high-rise, trying to get a settlement finished—and any bodies, metaphorical or literal, fully buried—before the merger deadline. The portentous emptiness of the office hallways, the secrecy of the meeting (Bach tells a Journal reporter fishing for info to kiss off), and the manic voice-over monologue of partner Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) make the scene feels like a prefiguration of the bankruptcy-driven mergers and acquisitions that would ripple through the finance industry the year after the film’s release—a series of all-night negotiations and conferences more literally depicted from the other side of the crisis in the 2011 financial thriller Margin Call.

Somebody might get rich from this deal, but it isn’t our titular hero (George Clooney); in fact, he’s worried it will end his career and leave him without protection, another casualty of a shifting economic environment, “trying to explain what the hell it is I do around here.” Unlike the Foxes and McDeeres of early-period corporate thrillers, Clayton isn’t a bushy-tailed young naif but a greying fixer. Those conspiracies that our heroes uncover in The Firm and Antitrust? That’s the kind of thing Clayton is paid to cover up. He’s there to keep business orderly and functioning, one bribe, bail bond, or called-in favor at a time. As he tells a client early in the movie, “I’m not a miracle-worker. I’m a janitor. The math on this is simple. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean up.” (Tony Gilroy, making his directorial debut at fifty, could probably relate, having become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated script doctors in the years since The Devil’s Advocate.)

The mess, in this case, involves an agrochemical giant called U-North, facing a class-action lawsuit over toxic pesticides. Edens, overseeing the U-North defense, has diligently protected his client from accountability. But the constant stress that accompanies years of concealment and rationalization has broken him, and Edens can no longer live with himself. “Am I just some freak organism that’s been put here to eat and sleep and spend my days defending this one horrific chain of carcinogenic molecules?” he asks Clayton, his former protégé. After he steals an incriminating memo and threatens to release it, Clayton is tasked with tracking him down and cleaning up.

Michael Clayton

The feeling that dominates Michael Clayton is one of stress and urgency, contraction and imminent implosion, fissures showing in a previously stable world. Edens, once a master of compartmentalization and billable stability, has cracked wide open in a manic eruption of guilt and shame. Clayton’s brother has fallen off the wagon; the restaurant they started together has gone bankrupt. He owes a loan shark $75,000, but the partners are trying to play hardball on his new contract. Clayton knows they’re pulling up the ladder and he’s going to be left behind with only his debts—along with any liability he’s incurred as a bagman to the rich and powerful.

Clayton was not the only person coming to terms with an increasingly unsustainable world. By the fall of 2007, the party, such as it had been, was nearly over, in Hollywood as in the U.S. economy as a whole. The subprime mortgage crisis was in full swing; the credit crunch was beginning; and the structural debts incurred by two decades of deregulation, financialization, and stratification were coming due.

The presence of Pollack, drawing on memories of his turn as the sinister gatekeeper Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), suggests that Michael Clayton might be seen as The Firm from the other side of the Great Moderation—a lawyerly conspiracy, but not one where a recent grad uncovers the corruption he didn’t realize existed. Instead, Clayton is a veteran fixer admitting to himself the true nature of the world he’s been living in: decades of greed, fraud, compromise, and cover-up. Maintaining one’s position on the inside of corporate America requires a heavy dose of self-deception too. That’s why even an insider as seasoned as Clayton can find himself slipping back into the naivete of a Bud Fox. As Pollack, playing Clayton’s shrewd, compromised boss, tells him: “Fifteen years in I gotta tell you how we pay the rent?”

The Criterion Channel’s May 2026 Lineup

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:15:00 +0000

Channel Calendars

This May, take a peek at movie history through the prism of the ’80s: our collection of the decade’s best remakes and the originals that inspired them reveals an era of wild reinventions and sly revisionism. Office Romances collects some of classic Hollywood’s most winning workplace rom-coms, while David Chase’s Adventures in Moviegoing retraces the cinematic education that shaped the creator of The Sopranos. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including the exclusive premiere of Debra Granik’s multipart documentary Conbody vs Everybody, a survey of radical Caribbean filmmaking, spotlights on genre-blending directors Kimi Takesue and the Ross brothers, and Bill Douglas’s landmark trilogy of autobiographical films.