Black Gold

Apr 9, 2021 — Uncovering “The Naked City,” Bruce Goldstein’s scintillating chronicle of The Naked City’s groundbreaking New York location shoot, is more than the best “where-they-filmed-it” doc ever made. As Goldstein wittily traces director Jules Dassin’s Gotham roots and influences, this twenty-three-minute documentary—now...

Mar 8, 2021 — “I see the beauty now,” my mother told me when I asked her what she thought of Cicely Tyson’s face, about a week after the pathbreaking actor died in January at ninety-six. “But I didn’t then.” By “then,” she meant...

Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...

Feb 13, 2021 — Ify Chiejina is a Nigerian American artist from Queens, New York, with a multifaceted process that incorporates drawing, painting, collage, and pattern design, resulting in a distinctive approach to portraiture. Her work speaks to themes of family, identity, and a...

Nov 20, 2020 — Standing before his friend Basil Hallward’s portrait of him, the paint barely dry, Dorian Gray implores to some unseen force: “If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old . ....

Oct 9, 2020 — In Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, veteran French journalist Philippe Garnier brings to life an enchantingly raffish community of typewriter-pounders who headed west to try their luck in the verbal gold rush set off by the...

Oct 9, 2020 — In the summer of 2020, I spoke with Philippe Garnier about his book Scoundrels & Spitballers: Writers and Hollywood in the 1930s, available for the first time in English from Eddie Muller’s Black Pool Productions. The book introduces a rogues’...

Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 The film world and ordinary people(s) in the four corners of the globe have long awaited the home-video release of Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun, 1970), the groundbreaking feature debut of one of Africa’s...

Jul 3, 2020 — As The War of the Worlds is essentially a cautionary tale, each generation gets its own adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic account of extraterrestrial invasion—one of the several seminal science-fiction novels, also including The Time Machine (1895) and The...

Jun 29, 2020 — Channel Calendars This July, the Criterion Channel celebrates unconventional artists who march to the beat of their own drum, with spotlights on indie iconoclast Miranda July, cutting-edge composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, downtown poet Sara Driver, lyrical documentarians Bill and Turner Ross, and formally...