The Marvels

May 27, 2025 — A landmark of independent cinema, Charles Burnett’s debut feature captures daily life in Watts, Los Angeles, with a depth and precision that evokes the history of Black American music.

Aug 28, 2020 — “Anyone with that kind of brilliance, you just give them space . . . She was a kind of unique, extraordinary, eccentric wild animal. And some jewels came out of her mouth.” Richard Gere On Halloween 1978, a month after...

Apr 14, 2019 — In the Criterion Channel’s ongoing series Adventures in Moviegoing, we invite renowned artists to open up about their personal journeys as cinephiles, and also to guest-program a series of their favorite films, so they can share their movie love directly...

Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...

Feb 14, 2019 — Repertory Picks This Friday, critic Girish Shambu will present Aki Kaurismäki’s warmhearted fable Le Havre (2011) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. The first entry in an ongoing trilogy about the plight of refugees in twenty-first-century Europe, the film is set...

Apr 25, 2011 — Brian De Palma brought hip, freewheeling funkiness to the American film renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wised-up, cinema-savvy audiences across the country knew to seek out his movies for their scruffy wit, showmanship, and aesthetic innovation, not...

Sep 28, 2010 — “The past, again and again.” —Major Jack Celliers, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Nagisa Oshima’s filmmaking career began with the risen sun—or rather, with the promise of a sun soon to rise: Tomorrow’s Sun (1959), a dizzyingly designed faux “coming attraction”...

Jan 12, 2010 — 8½: a bizarre and puzzling title, but one precisely appropriate for this film, which announces in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema. If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8½ surely goes beyond any predecessor...

Dec 27, 2019 — This week’s highlights stretch from the earliest animated shorts through the best of 1929 and 2019 to Godard’s next project.

Nov 14, 2018 — He transformed a fledgling comic book publisher into a juggernaut brand.