No Other Choice

Jul 21, 2025 — Summer offers new biographies and memoirs, expansively big ideas, and more than a few curious fictions.

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.

Feb 25, 2025 — Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.

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.

Apr 24, 2024 — In this early-career gem from one of the most beloved Japanese animation directors of all time, an extravagant sci-fi narrative is anchored by the transcendent power of young love and poignant observations of modern life.

Apr 16, 2024 — Unfolding in elaborately choreographed long takes, this sublime adaptation of László Krasznahorkai’s novel The Melancholy of Resistance captures the weight of time and the mood of fascism with a haunting palpability.

Jan 10, 2023 — In its ambivalence toward its provocative themes, John M. Stahl’s groundbreaking exploration of racial identity demonstrates the insolubility of Hollywood’s representational conundrum.

Dec 14, 2022 — Anthology Film Archives presents a series of films that “are—explicitly or implicitly—reworkings of earlier films.”

Dec 13, 2022 — A pioneering feminist artist drawn to universal themes, the Swedish director mined the complexity and humor of human behavior in films that courted controversy and cultivated a sense of detachment.

Dec 12, 2022 — The great but underrated Hollywood star Irene Dunne made her transition to screwball comedy by playing the scandal-courting author at the heart of Theodora Goes Wild.