Dont Look Back

Aug 17, 2021 — D. A. Pennebaker turns his camera on Stephen Sondheim and the cast of his breakthrough musical in this revelatory documentary about artists at work.

Feb 8, 2021 — 1. Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (2019)—the director’s second film about Dylan, after 2005’s No Direction Home—was nearly a decade in the making. Work on Rolling Thunder continued while Scorsese shot Silence (2016)...

Jan 19, 2021 — In the summer of 1976, my parents took me to see the tall ships in New York Harbor. I was ten, and I remember very little about it other than that I went and that the ships, tall, did not...

Aug 24, 2020 — In memory of D. A. Pennebaker (1925–2019) 1. The great documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker was motivated to shoot by curiosity. He loved music and friendship, and he had an understanding that everything he filmed recorded histories both personal and...

Aug 18, 2020 — Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s restless, captivating Direct Cinema triumph Town Bloody Hall is a work of oceanography, documenting one splashy moment in the cresting and crashing of American feminism’s second wave. The film chronicles the “Dialogue on Women’s...

Aug 6, 2019 — The groundbreaking filmmaker had a hand in inventing—and then reinventing over and again—the modern documentary.

Aug 26, 2017 — Alexandro Segade covers a lot of ground in his piece for Artforum on Sense8, the Netflix series created by Lana and Lilly Wachowski and J. Michael Straczynski which was cancelled this summer but granted one last two-hour episode for tying...

Jun 14, 2017 — This weekend marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Monterey International Pop Festival, “a watershed mega-concert that introduced America to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Who and Ravi Shankar; and also provided the first big-time platform for Janis Joplin and Otis...

Jun 3, 2016 — This August will bring two new Criterion releases to the United Kingdom: Dont Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker’s intimate 1967 portrait of Bob Dylan, and Arthur Hiller’s 1979 madcap classic The In-Laws. Head over to Amazon to check out our...

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.