The Criterion Collection
Kara Keeling is a professor of cinema and media studies and of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of two books: The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image...
Amy Abugo Ongiri is a professor and the director of Ethnic Studies at the University of Portland. Their book Spectacular Blackness explores the cultural politics of the Black Power movement, particularly the Black Arts Movement’s search to define a “Black...
Lisa B. Thompson is the Patton Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, Single Black Female,...
Racquel Gates is an associate professor of film at Columbia University. She is the author of Double Negative: The Black Image and Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2018) and is currently writing her second book, Blackness and the Invention of...
Greg Tate is a Village Voice staff alum, musician, and cultural provocateur who lives high atop Harlem’s Sugar Hill. His books include Flyboy in the Buttermilk, Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader, Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience,...
Sarita Cannon is an associate professor of English at San Francisco State University, where she teaches twentieth-century American literature. Her writing has appeared in African Voices, Journal of Popular Film and Culture, the Black Scholar, Ethnic Studies Review, and MELUS:...
Canadian writer and director Panos Cosmatos’s first feature, the hypnotic and fantastically effective sci-fi meditation Beyond the Black Rainbow, premiered at this year’s TriBeCa Film Festival and has since been picked up by Magnet Films.
Jan 22, 2026 — A singular achievement in Arab film history, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s sweeping political epic is a memorial to the lives lost in the struggle for Algerian independence.
Dec 22, 2025 — The critic and curator talks about working on a program of films by trailblazing Black women directors, which opened at London’s BFI Southbank this year and is now playing on the Criterion Channel.
On the Channel
Oct 16, 2025 — This month, join us for a Thanksgiving feast of some of the movies’ most memorable family reunions, or delve into the dark alleyways of noir mysteries built around protagonists tormented by amnesia, memory holes, and drunken blackouts.