The Criterion Collection
Jan 18, 2012 — Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarating works themselves as a Marxist harangue in...
Essays
Nov 23, 2010 — An overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice.—“Porpoise Song”Where there is choice, there is misery.—SwamiHow’s about some more steam?—Sonny Liston The final episode of the television show The Monkees aired March 25, 1968. Cowritten and directed by Micky Dolenz,...
May 20, 2009 — Iconoclasts are meant to kill their idols, and so it’s fitting that Shohei Imamura launched into his career as if on a patricidal rampage. Like Nagisa Oshima, the other towering figure of the Japanese New Wave, Imamura (1926–2006) rejected the...
Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles’s feature debut riffs on the French New Wave to tell a love story that portrays interracial intimacy and unflinchingly confronts the distortions of racism.
Essays
Mar 30, 2018 — This spectacular and technically ambitious Hollywood musical is a priceless window onto American pop culture’s view of itself in the 1930s.
Apr 26, 2016 — “It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today—the art of candid observation—didn’t exist,” writes Thom Powers.
The Daily
Oct 8, 2025 — We remember an artist, teacher, and filmmaker who unleashed realms of depth from two-dimensional images.
The Daily
Dec 15, 2023 — Pedro Almodóvar looks back, Roy Andersson empathizes, and Alice Diop addresses the state of cinema.
Features
Dec 12, 2022 — The great but underrated Hollywood star Irene Dunne made her transition to screwball comedy by playing the scandal-courting author at the heart of Theodora Goes Wild.