Persona

May 26, 2021 — Channel Calendars Next month, the Criterion Channel celebrates Pride Month with a host of extraordinary queer-themed films, including a new installment of our Queersighted series focusing on taboo-breaking artists, a trio of outré underground classics from John Waters, and a restrospective...

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.

Apr 9, 2021 — A round on the origins of works by Isabel Sandoval, Sky Hopinka, Steve McQueen, Pasolini, and Rivette.

Apr 8, 2021 — If I wanted to do justice to my memory of Bertrand Tavernier, I would have to tell half my life. That’s why I prefer to start with his films—and with the one I perhaps like the best. In Coup de...

Mar 31, 2021 — It has seemed to me for a long time that there is far too little screaming about Albert Brooks. It has seemed that way to all of his staunchest fans, who secretly relish being among the evolved few who know...

Mar 26, 2021 — In her hypnotic, uncategorizable films, the director serves as a channel for images that emerge from deep within her unconscious.

Mar 24, 2021 — Performances By the time The Manchurian Candidate was released in 1962, Frank Sinatra had been on American screens and in American hearts for nearly two decades. His bobby-soxers had been displaced by Elvis fans, who had been displaced by Beatles...

Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...

Mar 18, 2021 — The range this month is wide, from Tsai Ming-liang to Ida Lupino, from Tobe Hooper to Josephine Baker.

Mar 5, 2021 — When the photographer Mary Ellen Mark died in 2015 at age seventy-five from myelodysplastic syndrome, she left behind a vast and varied five-decade trail of portraits and documentary pictures, collected in twenty books and dozens of exhibitions, radical in their...