The Other

Dec 8, 2050 — By some remarkable alchemy, the modern Olympic Games and the cinema were born at nearly the same moment—between June 1894, when the first Olympic Congress was held in Paris under the inspired and visionary leadership of the French aristocrat Pierre...

Jun 23, 2026 — “Ozone Hole over Baltimore?” queries a panicky 1992 headline in the Baltimore Sun. Sure, as the article clarifies, the Maryland metropolis, eternal home base of trash icon John Waters, is no more vulnerable to ozone depletion than any other city...

Apr 14, 2026 — Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is a film about fear. That may not entirely jibe with its reputation as a biblical parody, but it might be the movie’s secret strength—why it continues to strike a nerve today. Many of...

Nov 29, 2023 — To watch Matt Wolf’s revelatory documentaries is to see life as a moving collage in which the past and present are woven together. Over the course of nine intensely researched and intricately crafted features and shorts, Wolf has combined his passion for...

Oct 4, 2023 — Night has fallen in London, but the streets still teem with people. Through a second-story window, we watch as an elderly Jewish man who lives over a shop is stabbed to death and his rooms are set on fire. We...

Sep 21, 2023 — Like the nuclear family, the internet shapes us whether or not we choose to relate to it. In 38, the final short in a triptych by filmmakers Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew, a woman approaching middle age becomes obsessed with...

Aug 29, 2023 — Exalting Black women’s self-invention with DIY effervescence, Drylongso (1998) is a gorgeously generous study of friendship, creativity, violence, and survival. The multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith developed the idea for the project from her habit of taking Polaroid photographs. Shot on...

Oct 26, 2022 — Deep Dives Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing...

Sep 9, 2022 — James Wong Howe was a fighter, and he learned how to be one over the course of a turbulent upbringing. Born Wong Tung Jim in 1899, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, the man who would become one of the...

May 25, 2022 — Combining the expressive power of a great storyteller with the skill of a master craftsman, Sean Phillips is an artist we’ve come back to time and time again at Criterion. From Sweet Smell of Success to On the Waterfront to...