Whatever Works

Jul 17, 1995 — Kurosawa made the acquaintance of Desu Uzala thirty years earlier, when he read Vladimir Arseniev’s account of charting the Russian-Manchurian border in the earlier part of this century. There, the Russian soldier and explorer had met Dersu, the Siberian hunter,...

Mar 31, 2026 — Violently nihilistic, simultaneously energizing and crushing, Tsui Hark’s remake of the martial-arts classic One-Armed Swordsman captures the zeitgeist of pre–1997 handover Hong Kong.

Sep 16, 2025 — In response to the suffocating conservatism of the eighties, Lizzie Borden crafted a pluralistic vision of a feminist front that neither ignores difference nor lets it stand as an immovable obstacle to political solidarity.

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.

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...

Sep 1, 2021 — New films by Pedro Almodóvar, Jane Campion, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Paul Schrader, and Paolo Sorrentino are set to premiere in competition.

Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...

Aug 19, 2013 — This moving drama about gender, race, and class in 1960s Kolkata is a pioneering work from Satyajit Ray.

Jan 13, 2018 — Even as we anxiously await If Beale Street Could Talk, based on the novel by James Baldwin and Barry Jenkins’s followup to Moonlight (image above: directing Alex R. Hibbert), he’s already attached to another project, as Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr....

Dec 18, 2018 — Whatever your cinephilic interest—cinematography, acting, criticism—there’ll likely be a new book to take with you into the holidays.