The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...
The Daily
Feb 1, 2021 — Critics and programmers introduce the thirty titles lined up for the Tiger and Big Screen competitions.
On the Channel
Nov 30, 2020 — Channel Calendars As the year draws to an end, we’re turning our gaze toward things to come, with an international, intergalactic program of Afrofuturist visions of Black creativity, resistance, and freedom. That’s just the beginning of our holiday bounty: we’ve...
Nov 25, 2020 — A camera dollies down a hallway into the interior of a nursing home: the opening of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (2019) prompts a foreboding that seeps into all that follows. The Five Satins’ 1956 doo-wop classic “In the Still of...
Essays
Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda In September 2018, I screened Agnès Varda and JR’s Faces Places for the Michigan State University Film Collective. We had a lively discussion that went past the scheduled ending time. As I was getting...
The Daily
Aug 5, 2020 — Lucrecia Martel, Lav Diaz, Helena Wittmann, and Lisandro Alonso are among the directors who will present projects interrupted by the pandemic.
Features
Mar 26, 2020 — Deep Dives BOOM! Mahler (1974) begins auspiciously and iconoclastically, as befits its director, with a peaceful lakeside scene shattered by an abrupt conflagration. The combusting hut echoes Kiss Me Deadly and anticipates The Sacrifice and Lost Highway (Lynch: “I got...
The Daily
Feb 5, 2020 — MoMA’s annual festival of nonfiction film and media is “eclectic by design.”
The Daily
Feb 3, 2020 — Nearly half of the awards presented over the weekend went to female filmmakers.
The Daily
Jan 23, 2020 — The return of Miranda July, a first feature from Garrett Bradley, and a new doc from Kirsten Johnson are a few of this year’s most anticipated features.