The Work

Aug 27, 2020 — In his novel All the Rest Have Died (1964), about his experience as a young actor in New York, Bill Gunn wrote, “I was always only slightly aware of the injustice the Black artist suffers while trying to create in...

Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.

Dec 30, 2016 — Did You See This? Richard Adams, the author of the beloved 1972 children’s novel Watership Down, passed away this week at the age of ninety-six. Adams’s best-selling book, which grapples with themes of political upheaval and ecological destruction through the...

Dec 2, 2016 — Apple TV viewers, you’re in luck! FilmStruck, the new streaming service we launched with Turner Classic Movies last month, is now available on Apple TV fourth-generation devices, in addition to Amazon Fire TV, web, iOS, and Android devices. Those using...

Feb 17, 2016 — It’s been nearly fifty years since the original release of Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging, yet the 1968 feature remains as viscerally powerful as ever. Oshima, one of the Japanese New Wave’s most prominent directors, made the film as a...

Nov 27, 2015 — From on-the-run crime dramas to swooning tales of love and loss, the films of French director Julien Duvivier marry beautiful camera work and an expressive, often poetic use of music and sounds. The dream sequence that opens the story in...

Nov 24, 2014 — There are few greater admirers of the late documentarian Les Blank than the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog. (The two were already close when Blank filmed the making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo for Burden of Dreams.) So we knew we wanted...

Sep 25, 2014 — All That Jazz echoes the tropes of the classic backstage movie musical, but it’s also a groundbreaking work of cinema, thanks largely to Bob Fosse and editor Alan Heim’s avant-garde approach to editing. In this Criterion video essay, critic Matt...

Apr 29, 2014 — One legendary American director pays tribute to another.

Feb 28, 2013 — Chronicle of a Summer, a sui generis 1961 collaboration between sociologist Edgar Morin and documentary filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch, is considered a pioneering work of cinéma-vérité. That term—coined by Morin himself—gets thrown around a lot, but what does it really mean?...