Number One

Apr 23, 2019 — Elia Kazan can be and has been called many things: a cinematic genius, an actor’s director, a womanizer, a government stoolie, an uncompromising artist and three-time Academy Award winner. But whatever your opinion of his personality, his temperament, or his...

Apr 15, 2019 — It’s one thing to have wild cinematic ambitions, and quite another to pursue them without a strong technical skill set and years of apprenticeship in the craft. But from the beginning of his career, the twenty-nine-year-old, mostly self-taught filmmaker Bi...

Apr 5, 2019 — Two-Lane Blacktop A longtime Criterion contributor, Kent Jones has written for us on everything from the glories of studio filmmaking to the most daring and cerebral of art-house auteurs. But regardless of the subject he’s set his sights on, he’s...

Mar 27, 2019 — Certain films find a way of creeping into your brain because they invite you to explore whole new worlds that continue well beyond their final frames. These movies force you to keep looking for answers to questions posed not just...

Mar 26, 2019 — As BAM prepares to present the largest U.S. retrospective yet, we look back on the singular oeuvre.

Mar 25, 2019 — In early 2007 the UCLA Film & Television Archive received a call from Hollywood Film and Video announcing that the lab was, sadly, closing—and clearing its vaults in two days’ time. Anything left was doomed to the dumpster. The next...

Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...

Mar 11, 2019 — It doesn’t take more than a few minutes of watching a Khalik Allah film to intuit that he’s a photographer. Over the course of just two documentary features, the thirty-four-year-old, New York–bred artist has developed an instantly recognizable style at...

Feb 27, 2019 — Studio Visits Growing up in Houston, Texas, in the 1970s and ’80s, Greg Ruth fell in love with art but had a hard time imagining himself pursuing it professionally. But almost three decades of devotedly plying his craft as an illustrator in a...

Feb 26, 2019 — The trailblazing African American director Charles Burnett’s third feature, To Sleep with Anger (1990), was his biggest production to date, albeit still made on a modest budget of $1.4 million, a significant portion of which was raised through the attachment...