The General Line

May 18, 2021 — The 1892 Chinese novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai opens with a prologue in which the author, Han Ziyun, writes from his own perspective, providing a gateway into the book by describing a dream he has had. Referring to himself...

Jun 17, 2025 — Drawing from over a dozen hours of black-and-white footage, Direct Cinema pioneer Charlotte Zwerin created this elliptical and moving portrait of one of American music’s most original artists.

Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.

Apr 16, 2021 — This week we’re checking in on the cinemas of Brazil and South Korea, reading about Terrence Malick, and listening in on Emma Thompson and Tony Kushner.

Sep 16, 2022 — The trailblazing and idiosyncratic filmmaker discusses her two newly restored shorts, her childhood in Detroit, and her decision to leave the movie industry behind.

Jun 27, 2019 — Sergei Bondarchuk pulled out all the stops to bring Tolstoy’s sprawling vision to the screen, and the result remains one of the most extravagant epic films of all time.

Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...

Apr 16, 2016 — Last week, at the Metrograph, New York City’s newest art-house cinema, we held our inaugural installment of Criterion Live!, in honor of our forthcoming release of The Kennedy Films of Robert Drew & Associates. Hosted by Criterion president Peter Becker...

Apr 25, 2022 — During a precarious time for film exhibition, Inney Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York, had an idea to rethink the bounds of nonfiction cinema. He ended up conceiving Prismatic Ground, a festival that launched...

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Ozu Yasujiro’s personal feelings about Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s are not on record. Perhaps, like most people around him, he accepted the...