Arrival

Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...

Jul 13, 2021 — Miles: I just sold a building on the Lower East Side and tripled my money Molly: There’s a lot of that happening these days. Released the year before Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Working Girls, a film about sex work, is a sharper by far...

Jun 17, 2021 — The first real lesbian kiss in a film is an honor that rightfully belongs to Mädchen in Uniform. It’s true that a year earlier, in 1930, Marlene Dietrich played a tux-clad chanteuse who snogs a woman in a nightclub audience...

May 11, 2021 — Dorothy Arzner’s deeply cynical portrait of marriage exemplifies the director’s ambivalence toward the norms dictating female behavior, wielding ironic detachment to mask one woman’s simmering inner turmoil.

May 1, 2021 — Filmmaking, at its best, has always sought to bear witness to, and create new perspectives on, our lived realities. But no one has mined the eccentric possibilities of the cinematic medium to address the vertiginous social and cultural changes borne...

Apr 28, 2021 — Channel Calendars Next month, the Criterion Channel celebrates independent, pathbreaking, and underappreciated artists. We’ve got a retrospective devoted to Gena Rowlands (pictured), the indie-film legend whose acting blurred the line between life and performance; a centenary tribute to the great...

Apr 21, 2021 — First Person The first time I saw Terence Davies’s 1992 film The Long Day Closes, I was upended by a recurring image of the sensitive Liverpool lad at its heart, his arms folded across a worn window ledge as he...

Apr 2, 2021 — One Scene Thomas Vinterberg no longer holds fast to the ascetic tenets of Dogme 95, the film movement he cofounded in 1995 with fellow Danish director Lars von Trier, but what has remained constant throughout his career is his sharp...

Feb 26, 2021 — There would be no Indonesian cinema without Usmar Ismail (1921–71). His third feature, The Long March (Darah dan doa, 1950), was not only the first film to be produced by a fully Indonesian crew and production company but also one...

Feb 24, 2021 — Hollywood is the unofficial ministry of propaganda for the United States. Newcomers to this country typically begin their process of Americanization well before they arrive, having been exposed, for quite some time, to the long-distance bombardment of American blockbusters. In...