The Criterion Collection
Feb 24, 2021 — He never really pushes that cart, does he? Despite the film’s title, Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), the mournfully persistent protagonist of Ramin Bahrani’s 2005 debut feature, Man Push Cart, is almost always seen pulling his cart through the nighttime streets of...
Essays
Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...
Essays
Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 An artist, critic, and scholar highly respected in his native Iran but too little known in the West, Bahram Beyzaie is a gifted autodidact of traditional and modern theater and performing arts, and...
Features
Aug 14, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of an adventurous career that encompassed narrative and documentary filmmaking as well as photography, sculpture, and video installation, Agnès Varda was a shape-shifter who merged her deep engagement with social reality with a playful, endlessly...
Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...
Features
Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...
Sneak Peeks
Feb 18, 2015 — Don’t Look Now is many things: terrifying, poignant, mysterious, sexy, tragic. That all these disparate qualities are woven together so seamlessly is partly a miracle of cutting, so one must give proper credit to the film’s editor, Graeme Clifford. In...
Jan 13, 2014 — With economy and panache, Michael Mann established his existential crime drama style with this breakthrough first feature.
Jan 3, 2014 — Did You See This?• Being Judith Anderson • A directors’ roundtable with Steve McQueen, Spike Jonze, and others • Godard’s coming attractions • The perils of adapting books to the screen • Remembering composer Wojciech Kilar • The fight over...
Dec 11, 2012 — Cinema is both an educational tool and a vessel for kinetic, avant-garde expression for filmmaker and activist Godfrey Reggio.