The Little American

Aug 7, 2018 — Can creative genius flourish on the federal dime? Animator Norman McLaren’s remarkably innovative, government-funded films suggest it can.

Jan 22, 2018 — Today, we celebrate Jim Jarmusch’s birthday with a look back at some of the writing we’ve published on his films over the years.

Mar 18, 2017 — The landscape of late-nineties American film culture found a loving chronicler in John Pierson, whose groundbreaking TV series Split Screen premiered on IFC in 1997 and now has its streaming home on the Criterion Channel. In this excerpt from the...

Jun 4, 2016 — Wim Wenders’s road movies, Michael Almereyda writes, are “at once minimal and romantic, austere and lyrical,” focusing on questions—of individuals and society, culture and nature—that Wenders has returned to throughout his career.

Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.

Jan 28, 2014 — Terence Davies beckons the viewer into a private world of moods and sensations with this exquisite childhood reverie.

Nov 20, 2012 — For a brief, shining moment, the genteel Japanese studio mutated into a fun house of grim ghouls and slimy aliens.

Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...

Jun 30, 2026 — The distinction between social and political cinema is not always clear. The former category, which focuses on realistic portrayals of the everyday lives and struggles of the working class, generally includes the films of Italian neorealism and British social realism,...

Mar 30, 2026 — Suffused with visual beauty and moments of magical realism, Jess X. Snow’s queer diasporic cinema invites us to imagine new possibilities for freedom, transformation, and intergenerational healing.