Showing Up

Apr 24, 2019 — When It Rains Charles Burnett has long been recognized by historians as one of the greatest American film directors, and he’s won numerous important awards, including an honorary Oscar in 2017. Nevertheless, he is still relatively unknown beyond the world...

Mar 25, 2019 — In early 2007 the UCLA Film & Television Archive received a call from Hollywood Film and Video announcing that the lab was, sadly, closing—and clearing its vaults in two days’ time. Anything left was doomed to the dumpster. The next...

Feb 5, 2019 — The festival focuses on promising filmmakers few of us know much about yet and neglected treasures from the archives.

Jan 31, 2019 — The actor’s immediately relatable face left a lasting impression in nearly 200 films and television shows.

Jan 25, 2019 — Gifted with crack timing and a caustic wit, Elaine May first came up as an improv comedian in the late fifties, forming the popular satirical tandem of Nichols and May with her college classmate Mike Nichols. By the time May...

Jan 7, 2019 — The artist behind our new cover for Hitchcock’s spy-noir masterwork remembers falling in love with the film as a child and walks through the process of illustrating one of its most iconic scenes.

Dec 28, 2018 — Ulysses S. Jenkins’s Two-Zone Transfer By this time in December, the usual onslaught of critics’ polls and nomination lists has given movie lovers a feeling of consensus about what was unmissable over the past twelve months. We were curious about...

Dec 26, 2018 — Members of the Criterion tech team headed to India last month to teach some practical skills in moving-image conservation at the Film Preservation & Restoration Workshop.

Dec 17, 2018 — Secrets from the past are always surfacing in melodramas, altering or illuminating the landscape of the present. So it seems fitting that director John M. Stahl, one of Hollywood’s great masters of melodrama, had a past that is only now...

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...