The Challenge

Apr 29, 2025 — Drawing from a rich tradition of films that depict the lives of sex workers, Sean Baker’s Oscar-winning triumph takes a complex approach to exploring the fundamentally transactional nature of human relationships.

Dec 3, 2024 — Absent from so many critics’ best-of-2024 lists, A Different Man wins Best Feature.

Oct 31, 2023 — With the full force of her imagination, director Nikyatu Jusu examines the complicated nature of Black motherhood, as well as the importance of Black communion as an antidote to racial oppression.

Jul 11, 2023 — Martin Scorsese drew on the influence of Hitchcock and Kafka for this anxiety-ridden tale of one bizarre night in New York City—a movie that energized him during a tumultuous period in his career.

Mar 29, 2023 — The Brazil-based programmer discusses her transnational, oppositional approach to curating the daring lineup for Opacity, which was presented at the Flaherty Seminar in 2021 and is now available on the Criterion Channel.

Aug 26, 2022 — Louise Brooks, Marguerite Duras, Lucrecia Martel, and Jacquelyn Mills headline this week’s roundup.

Feb 4, 2022 — This week: Céline Sciamma, Julia Ducournau, Jane Campion, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, and Joachim Trier and Renate Reinsve.

Jan 31, 2022 — Movies are about looking, and no one involved in the making of a film is more directly responsible for the frames we look at than a cinematographer, or director of photography. Together with the director, the cinematographer shapes the visual...

May 11, 2021 — Dorothy Arzner’s deeply cynical portrait of marriage exemplifies the director’s ambivalence toward the norms dictating female behavior, wielding ironic detachment to mask one woman’s simmering inner turmoil.

Jan 13, 2021 — About a decade ago, I went to see Welcome, or No Trespassing at Spectacle. It’s still the only time I’ve known anyone to project the movie, a 1964 satire of Soviet summer camps that was the debut feature of Elem...