The Oath

Apr 26, 2022 — In the opening moments of Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) (2020), we first hear—the ceaseless hum of machines at work—and then see: a jumble of multicolored wires. The 16 mm film image is grainy, trembling ever...

Sep 11, 2015 — Laura Poitras has proven to be one of the most daring and necessary voices in contemporary documentary cinema with such works as The Oath and the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. So we’re excited to hear that she, along with her fellow documentarian...

Mar 29, 2017 — Film journalist Mark Harris stopped by Criterion to chat about the growing pains that five Hollywood filmmakers experienced during World War II.

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Mar 5, 2018 — New York. “The New York street (and fashion) photographer turned New Left filmmaker gets a ninetieth birthday fête with The Eyes of William Klein,” writes J. Hoberman for the New York Review of Books. “Klein made his most political work...

May 21, 2019 — Malick’s rendering of the true story of a conscientious objector has split the critics.

Sep 26, 2025 — One of the most provocative subgenres of 1970s exploitation cinema, nunsploitation explores the collision of sex and religious dogma through stories of desperately horny women of the cloth.

Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.

Aug 31, 2020 — “Movies show us ourselves as we had not yet learned to recognize us—something in the nature of daily being or happening that quickly gets folded over into ancient history like yesterday’s newspaper, but in so doing a new face has...

Feb 2, 2004 — A story about defeat and failure, Robert Bresson’s masterpiece is a milestone in the slow process of the liberation of postwar French cinema