The Soviet Story

Sep 18, 2025 — This month’s programs offer a feast of horror, including a John Carpenter retrospective and a collection of the most terrifying films of the 2000s.

Sep 25, 2024 — A dozen newly restored films from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s will screen in this year’s program.

Aug 5, 2022 — We wrap the week with melodrama and Odorama, a new magazine, and the summer of 1982.

Feb 24, 2022 — Next month on the Criterion Channel, we’re pushing the envelope with a series of the pre-Code films made by Paramount Pictures, a centenary tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini, and a collection of groundbreaking concert documentaries.

Aug 13, 2019 — Something uncanny is brewing in George Sikharulidze’s Fatherland. This darkly comedic film transports us to a spring evening in Joseph Stalin’s birthplace—Gori, Georgia—where the townspeople have gathered on the sixty-third anniversary of their long-departed leader’s death. What follows is part...

Jan 28, 2019 — With WR: Mysteries of the Organism, the late Serbian director made what Amos Vogel called “one of the most important subversive masterpieces of the 1970s.”

Jul 26, 2018 — Sergei Parajanov’s mesmerizing take on the life of poet Sayat-Nova plays in a free screening in Los Angeles this week.

Jun 27, 2017 — Alfred Hitchcock brings a spirit of cinematic ingenuity to a thin narrative, resulting in a flawed but fascinating film that contains one of the most virtuosic sequences in his filmography.

Jun 29, 2016 — In this essay, first published in Grand Street in 1994, Dr. Strangelove coscreenwriter Terry Southern offers a lively behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production.

Jun 23, 2008 — Five years of increasingly horrific news from the former Yugoslavia made Milcho Manchevski’s searing yet lyrical film timely to a degree that few filmmakers have ever achieved.