In the Loop

Aug 14, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of an adventurous career that encompassed narrative and documentary filmmaking as well as photography, sculpture, and video installation, Agnès Varda was a shape-shifter who merged her deep engagement with social reality with a playful, endlessly...

Aug 7, 2018 — Can creative genius flourish on the federal dime? Animator Norman McLaren’s remarkably innovative, government-funded films suggest it can.

May 17, 2017 — Welcome to the first entry of the Daily at the Criterion Collection. For those of you who don’t know me, since 2003 I’ve been gathering links to essential—or simply fun—reading, news stories, and items of interest into a sort of...

Sep 1, 2016 — Balancing epic scale with lyrical intimacy, Orson Welles inflects the spirit of Shakespeare’s history plays with his own zest for cinematic invention.

Dec 16, 2021 — Whether their lists run to ten or fifty films, critics argue their cases for the films they’ve put on top.

Aug 25, 2014 — Love and death tango in Bob Fosse’s glittering ode to his own mortality.

Apr 25, 2022 — During a precarious time for film exhibition, Inney Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York, had an idea to rethink the bounds of nonfiction cinema. He ended up conceiving Prismatic Ground, a festival that launched...

Mar 28, 2022 — At once euphoric and elegiac, Martin Scorsese’s concert documentary captures the members of the Band on the brink of spiritual and physical collapse as they mount their transcendent final send-off.

Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...

Dec 7, 2021 — Regina King’s feature-film directorial debut envisions the true-life convergence of four prominent Black figures with empathy and moral urgency.