Dark House

Mar 10, 2021 — For about five minutes in Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View, the lights go down on our movie and we’re shown another—an increasingly deranged propaganda short designed to suss out whether someone is Parallax material. That is to say, an...

Feb 25, 2021 — Channel Calendars Giddy up, movie lovers! This month on the Channel, our Black Westerns series leads the charge, highlighting films that have challenged the myths of the Old West to tell the stories of African Americans on the frontier. And...

Feb 24, 2021 — He never really pushes that cart, does he? Despite the film’s title, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), the mournfully persistent protagonist of Ramin Bahrani’s 2005 debut feature, Man Push Cart, is almost always seen pulling his cart through the nighttime streets of...

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Feb 12, 2021 — The virtual first half of this year’s festival will premiere new work from Céline Sciamma, Hong Sangsoo, Dominik Graf, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi.

Jan 26, 2021 — I stumbled onto Will Niava’s debut short film, Zoo, via a still I saw online: a close-up of a young man’s face under blue neon, framed by cigarette smoke. Curious about this striking image, I tracked down the film and...

Jan 26, 2021 — Larisa Shepitko was born in eastern Ukraine in 1938. Her mother was a schoolteacher; her father, who left the family, fought in World War II. Her mother raised her and her two siblings on her own, and the moment Larisa...

Dec 29, 2020 — Channel Calendars The stars are aligned for the first month of the New Year on the Criterion Channel. We’re pleased to be kicking off 2021 with a tribute to Jane Fonda, whose greatest hits reflect her multifaceted career as a political activist...

Dec 8, 2020 — Frederick Wiseman’s documentary ranks high in the latest round of lists of the best films and television of 2020.

Nov 30, 2020 — Channel Calendars As the year draws to an end, we’re turning our gaze toward things to come, with an international, intergalactic program of Afrofuturist visions of Black creativity, resistance, and freedom. That’s just the beginning of our holiday bounty: we’ve...