The Whole Family Works

Dec 19, 2023 — Year’s end brings new translations of Serge Daney and Jean Cocteau and new books on Francis Ford Coppola and Jia Zhangke.

Jan 31, 2022 — Movies are about looking, and no one involved in the making of a film is more directly responsible for the frames we look at than a cinematographer, or director of photography. Together with the director, the cinematographer shapes the visual...

Aug 3, 2021 — With two short films and his acclaimed debut feature, No Data Plan, now playing on the Criterion Channel, the Filipino American filmmaker discusses his vision of the immigrant experience.

Nov 8, 2011 — With the very first shots of Fanny and Alexander (1982), director Ingmar Bergman announces his perspective and signals his intentions. Here, we find the ten-year-old Alexander gazing into a puppet theater, lifting layer after layer of skillfully painted backdrop. We...

Feb 17, 2023 — Born and raised far from the centers of power in the movie industry, writer-director Glen Pitre began his career in the 1980s as a DIY filmmaker, showing his homemade productions to audiences in his native Louisiana. But when a powerful...

Mar 9, 2020 — “My objective is to create my own world, and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are.” Andrei Tarkovsky More than three decades after his passing, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky retain their ability...

Mar 27, 2019 — Certain films find a way of creeping into your brain because they invite you to explore whole new worlds that continue well beyond their final frames. These movies force you to keep looking for answers to questions posed not just...

Jun 17, 2015 — From a shrewd adaptation by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, Jonathan Demme fashions a visually inventive dreamscape out of an Ibsen classic.

Mar 28, 2022 — Rosine Mbakam’s documentaries are exercises in reconfiguring relations of power. Her first three nonfiction features are all portraits of Cameroonian women, each of whom is invited to participate in coconstructing a cinematic space of testimony, candor, and expressive autonomy. Filmed...

Jun 30, 2025 — An up-and-coming director reflects on the resourcefulness and scrappy ingenuity that went into making his three films, now playing on the Criterion Channel.