All I Desire

Sep 30, 2021 — The Oscar-winning actor—whose one-hundredth birthday we’re celebrating on the Criterion Channel—embodied a mess of contradictions that have long been obscured by her reputation for unbending rectitude.

Sep 28, 2021 — The first Black-directed movie musical of the modern film era, Melvin Van Peebles’s drama illuminates the cultural and political concerns of working-class Black people with delight and fancy.

Sep 2, 2021 — A dark chapter in Spain’s history lurks in the background of Almodóvar’s exuberant comedy.

Aug 13, 2021 — This week we’re reading about the first and second waves of noir and taking a good look at a smartly dressed man.

Jul 20, 2021 — Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.

Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...

Jun 17, 2021 — On our minds this week: Lizzie Borden, Jenni Olson, Dorothy Arzner, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Rivette, and female detectives on television.

Jun 15, 2021 — These landmark documentary portraits of intergenerational struggle in Seattle expose social horrors while also revealing the humanity of their subjects.

Jun 14, 2021 — Postwar Hollywood’s quintessential heavy wields his signature mix of brutality and neurosis to embody an abusive husband in Max Ophuls’s psychological drama.

Jun 2, 2021 — Christian Petzold reunites with Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, the stars of Transit (2018), for a contemporary fable.