Just Between Us

Jul 19, 2024 — We’re looking back to films by Pakula and Oshima, and from the 1990s, by Claire Denis and Richard Shepard.

Aug 29, 2023 — Exalting Black women’s self-invention with DIY effervescence, Drylongso (1998) is a gorgeously generous study of friendship, creativity, violence, and survival. The multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith developed the idea for the project from her habit of taking Polaroid photographs. Shot on...

Jun 22, 2022 — The long, quietly tense opening minutes of L’eclisse offer a blueprint for filmmakers looking to craft a devastating breakup scene.

Feb 9, 2022 — The Learning Tree may have been Gordon Parks’s first feature film as a director, but by the time filming began in the fall of 1968, Parks already had almost three decades of experience behind a camera. In 1940, the self-taught...

Feb 4, 2021 — Here’s an overview of what critics have been saying about this year’s winners.

May 14, 2020 — Restoration Spotlight I was just coming of age as a moviegoer when digital video hit the big screens, around the turn of the twenty-first century. At the time, I remember being every bit as entranced by the gritty horror of...

Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...

May 23, 2017 — “Of all of the documentaries made about North Korea by Westerners in recent years, Claude Lanzmann’s Napalm, which premiered Sunday out of competition at Cannes, is by far the most peculiar, not to mention the most brazenly narcissistic,” writes Cineaste...

Apr 26, 2016 — “It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today—the art of candid observation—didn’t exist,” writes Thom Powers.

Jun 20, 2017 — With both films now streaming on the Criterion Channel, director Carroll Ballard discusses the parallels between his short documentary Rodeo and Francesco Rosi’s bull-fighting classic The Moment of Truth.