The American Friend

Jun 30, 2025 — An up-and-coming director reflects on the resourcefulness and scrappy ingenuity that went into making his three films, now playing on the Criterion Channel.

May 17, 2022 — Juzo Itami’s tragicomic directorial debut has scandalous fun with the Japanese traditions governing death.

Apr 28, 2021 — Channel Calendars Next month, the Criterion Channel celebrates independent, pathbreaking, and underappreciated artists. We’ve got a retrospective devoted to Gena Rowlands (pictured), the indie-film legend whose acting blurred the line between life and performance; a centenary tribute to the great...

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...

Sep 10, 2020 — In this in-depth interview, the legendary photographer and filmmaker explains how a lifetime of compulsive movie-watching has influenced her artistic practice.

Jan 3, 2020 — The director of Margaret and Manchester by the Sea celebrates Hollywood’s greatest humanist, whose films are featured in a series now playing on the Criterion Channel.

Aug 6, 2019 — The groundbreaking filmmaker had a hand in inventing—and then reinventing over and again—the modern documentary.

Jun 7, 2019 — He is the most disarming and self-effacing of the English actors who dominated stage and screen in the middle of the twentieth century—the others were John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. Those fellows carried themselves like grand...

Jun 3, 2019 — Wisdom from the Pope of Trash, the making of Raging Bull and The Wild Bunch, and studies of Tarkovsky and the Berlin School all figure in this month’s round.