Being There

Jul 23, 2024 — Chen Kaige’s sweeping epic chronicles the history of twentieth-century China through the story of two childhood friends, contrasting the unchanging traditions of their Beijing-opera milieu with the nation’s swift and turbulent transformation.

Jul 18, 2024 — A pioneer of the 1980s downtown New York arts scene, the director of Sleepwalk talks about navigating her creative life in the city and the inspiration she has taken from mythology, fairy tales, and cinéma fantastique.

Jul 16, 2024 — In one of the most patient films he has ever made, Wim Wenders captures how everyday existence drifts into our dream lives.

Jul 15, 2024 — Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay’s new book assesses the history and future of transness in cinema.

Jul 12, 2024 — We dive this week into the worlds of Jean Eustache, Walerian Borowczyk, John Ford, Kozaburo Yoshimura, and Chris Marker.

Jul 10, 2024 — This year’s edition opens with jazz, features three revivals, and wraps with Godzilla.

Jun 25, 2024 — A collection on the Criterion Channel charts the evolution of the synthesizer—from its infancy in the 1950s to its maturity in the 1980s—and its transformative impact on film music.

Jun 25, 2024 — Barry Jenkins’s extraordinarily ambitious limited series distinguishes itself in the tradition of the cinematic slavery epic through its understanding that Black joy and Black trauma cannot be cleaved from each other.

Jun 21, 2024 — An underrated figure of Japanese cinema’s postwar era, the director tackled a wide range of subjects over his long career, including corporate double-dealing, government espionage, and various forms of fanaticism.

Jun 18, 2024 — We’re diving deeper this month into a new Elaine May biography and memoirs from Susan Seidelman and Griffin Dunne.