Early Works

Jul 21, 2026 — New restorations of the first three features premiere this weekend, followed by a retrospective next month.

Jul 21, 2026 — At the beginning of Cruel Story of Youth (1960), the title splashes across the screen in fiery red. Each of the three Japanese words that appear offers a key to understanding director Nagisa Oshima’s breakthrough film and the energies that...

Jul 17, 2026 — Channel Calendars This month on the Criterion Channel, crank up the volume on our playlist of (actually good) rock biopics that go beyond cliché to explore the elusive place where inspiration sparks and musical legends are born. Our Southern Gothic...

Jul 14, 2026 — In May of 1962, when Martin Ritt arrived in the Texas Panhandle town of Claude to begin filming Hud, he may have sensed that his career was about to change. Hud would be Ritt’s ninth feature but his first personal...

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,...

Jun 23, 2026 — “Ozone Hole over Baltimore?” queries a panicky 1992 headline in the Baltimore Sun. Sure, as the article clarifies, the Maryland metropolis, eternal home base of trash icon John Waters, is no more vulnerable to ozone depletion than any other city...

Jun 22, 2026 — Deep Dives In 1971, upon the release of his first and only feature film, James Bidgood pulled a disappearing act. He had spent the better part of seven years shooting Pink Narcissus, a hallucinatory tale of a daydreaming gay hustler, on...

Jun 18, 2026 — Martin Scorsese, Agnès Varda, Lars von Trier, and Katharine Hepburn are just a few of the names you might be adding to your summer reading list.

Jun 16, 2026 — The debut in 1998 of Lisa Cholodenko’s first feature film, High Art, was a triumph. The intense mastery of its form and the freshness of its narrative created waves of excitement—from the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo...

May 28, 2026 — Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà present two series back to back, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and History, Italian Style.