Sleep

Jean Ma is the author of Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema (2010), Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema (2015), and At the Edges of Sleep (forthcoming). She teaches film and media studies at Stanford University.

Apr 24, 2019 — When It Rains Charles Burnett has long been recognized by historians as one of the greatest American film directors, and he’s won numerous important awards, including an honorary Oscar in 2017. Nevertheless, he is still relatively unknown beyond the world...

Apr 20, 2019 — The latest installment of the Criterion Channel’s Meet the Filmmakers series, in which we invite artists to create documentary portraits of directors they admire, sets out for a stroll with an underappreciated American master: Charles Burnett, the poetic realist behind...

Mar 7, 2019 — As one of the leading figures of the L.A. Rebellion, a loosely defined movement of filmmakers who were pioneering new forms of African-American on-screen representation in the 1960s and ’70s, Charles Burnett has long been heavily associated with Los Angeles....

Jun 23, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, the TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto will show Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 dramatic thriller The Bad Sleep Well as part of its summer series of special screenings. Starring the Japanese screen icon and longtime Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune, the...

Jul 2, 2026 — I first met Courtney Love in 1994. I was twelve years old, and I felt ugly and confused pretty much all the time. I was slouching through the locker bay at Calle Mayor Middle School in Torrance, California, when I...

Jul 1, 2026 — BAM’s thirteen-film series dips into chapters of American history that tend to get overlooked on Fourth of July weekends.

Jun 9, 2026 — Over the course of four decades, the great Mauritanian French filmmaker Med Hondo created a stylistically diverse, politically trenchant body of work that frequently tapped into his own Pan-African roots and explored the existential and material stresses of Black people...

Apr 28, 2026 — In April 1992, John Singleton was en route to the set of his second film when he heard the verdict on the radio. A predominantly white jury had acquitted four police officers who, a year earlier, had been caught on...

Apr 23, 2026 — Over the next four days, the Museum of the Moving Image will be showcasing a wide range of “adventurous new cinema.”