The Music Man

Dec 31, 2023 — We’re ringing in the new year with a look back at a selection of the most exciting pieces we published in 2023.

Oct 26, 2023 — Ever since he began working with the Miami-based film festival and collective Third Horizon in 2016, Jonathan Ali has been finding ways of celebrating Caribbean cinema and how it captures the irreducible complexity of the region and its diaspora. He...

Sep 26, 2023 — In this vibrant, music-filled portrait of an artist and his community, director Luis Valdez gathers what little is known about rock-and-roll idol Ritchie Valens and fuses it with a lived-in understanding of what it is to be Chicano.

Aug 22, 2023 — In 1962, the young Bo Widerberg threw a grenade into the complacent waters of Swedish cinema. It came in the form of four articles in the evening newspaper Expressen—followed by a book version titled Vision in 
Swedish Film—in which Widerberg...

Jul 10, 2023 — Writer-archivist-filmmaker Jenni Olson and critic Caden Mark Gardner discuss Masc, a collection of films on the Criterion Channel that explores the many forms of masculinity beyond the realm of cisgender men.

Jun 14, 2023 — In her deeply empathetic documentaries, the British filmmaker illuminates the lives of ordinary people who have quietly created new identities and possibilities for themselves.

Apr 19, 2023 — Paul Thomas Anderson, Maria Schneider, and fictional figures—Blanche DuBois and Juliet Capulet—figure in this month’s roundup.

Jan 24, 2023 — Filled with evocative images and guided by the unique aesthetic sensibility of the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s film is an exploration of the power of grief that is paradoxically uplifting.

Jan 9, 2023 — The films in the Criterion Channel collection Free Jazz chronicle the development of a deeply experimental music that has baffled and enthralled listeners in equal measure.

Nov 22, 2022 — Spike Lee’s transcendent portrait of an American hero is an urgent call for the nation to live up to everything it claims to be.