The Lesson

Dec 1, 2025 — One of the most vital playwrights of our era was also an award-winning screenwriter.

Jun 16, 2025 — The New York theater screens films by Miranda July, William Lustig, D. A. Pennebaker, and Yasujiro Ozu.

Jul 2, 2024 — Self-destruction is not only an aesthetic but its own subject matter in Sam Peckinpah’s deeply elegiac western, a towering masterpiece that examines American power and greed.

May 16, 2024 — Does it measure up? For most reviewers, the answer is a resounding yes—but there are a few outliers.

May 6, 2022 — This week: Tarkovsky’s answer to Kubrick, the Otolith Group, Brooklyn filmmakers, German scenes, and Béatrice Dalle.

Nov 30, 2020 — Channel Calendars As the year draws to an end, we’re turning our gaze toward things to come, with an international, intergalactic program of Afrofuturist visions of Black creativity, resistance, and freedom. That’s just the beginning of our holiday bounty: we’ve...

Oct 30, 2020 — In his tension-filled, black-comic Oscar winner, Bong Joon Ho masterfully mixes tones and subverts genres in order to shine a harsh light on the mechanisms that maintain class inequality.

Jun 29, 2020 — The new issue ranges from experimental nonfiction to a Pixar feature, from a ten-screen installation to Watchmen.

Jan 3, 2020 — The director of Margaret and Manchester by the Sea celebrates Hollywood’s greatest humanist, whose films are featured in a series now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Dec 1, 2009 — The deeply disturbing drama of this landmark documentary about the Rolling Stones sprang from the disturbing drama of the times.