On the Beat

Mar 25, 2026 — The Harvard Film Archive celebrates the first decade of work by a key figure of the Japanese New Wave.

Sep 24, 2025 — Jacques Audiard’s Paris-set drama about small-time hoodlum with musical ambitions crystallized his identity as an artist with a high degree of confidence and control.

Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...

Feb 20, 2024 — I have, over time, become wary of and impatient with the word authentic, especially when it’s too casually and blithely deployed, as it often is these days, to defame or diminish someone or something based on arbitrary standards of what...

Nov 24, 2025 — This month brings new collections from Melissa Anderson and A. S. Hamrah and a whole shelf of lives lived with the movies.

Jun 29, 2020 — Channel Calendars This July, the Criterion Channel celebrates unconventional artists who march to the beat of their own drum, with spotlights on indie iconoclast Miranda July, cutting-edge composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, downtown poet Sara Driver, lyrical documentarians Bill and Turner Ross, and formally...

Nov 23, 2021 — First and foremost, Menace II Society is a movie for white people.These aren’t my words. These are the words of Albert Hughes, who codirected the movie with his twin brother, Allen. In several interviews, Albert has mentioned how he and...

Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...

Jun 20, 2018 — The anniversary edition features three world premieres and the best of this year’s Sundance.

Mar 26, 2026 — The star of Lady Snowblood and the Stray Cat Rock and Female Prisoner Scorpion series will be taking questions.