Feb 19, 2026 — Though in many ways the quintessential company man, the director brought an intimate understanding of the margins of American society to the films he made for Warner Bros. in the 1930s.

Sep 25, 2023 — There was a period under the Nixon administration when the collective American psyche, as seen on film, seemed almost convulsed by its fixation on the motor vehicle. Every other week a moviegoer might see a film that could broadly be...

Oct 7, 2022 — This underappreciated 1968 film is a feast of dark delights, filled with vengeful ghosts, psychically linked identical twins, obsessed mad scientists, creepy priests, and seemingly sentient skeletons.

Apr 29, 2022 — Channel Calendars This month on the Criterion Channel, we’re celebrating the career of one of our favorite contemporary American filmmakers—the independent, inquisitive, and ever-eclectic Richard Linklater—with a retrospective of beloved hits and lesser-known gems selected by the director himself. Take...

Apr 25, 2022 — During a precarious time for film exhibition, Inney Prakash, a programmer at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York, had an idea to rethink the bounds of nonfiction cinema. He ended up conceiving Prismatic Ground, a festival that launched...

Feb 26, 2021 — First Person When I was eight years old, I discovered what it meant to be of two minds. I didn’t discover this in any intellectual way; this was brought to bear on me in 1973 because that’s the year my...

Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...

Dec 8, 2020 — Swiss-Moroccan filmmaker Halima Ouardiri’s short documentary Mutts is a captivating portrait of a shelter for stray dogs in Morocco, elegantly shot in a sunbaked color palette of rich golds and browns. The film, which makes its premiere on the Criterion Channel this week in...

May 22, 2020 — The Times of Harvey Milk Today—May 22, 2020—would have been Harvey Milk’s ninetieth birthday. Harvey was forty-five when I first met him in his camera store; I was nineteen. Harvey was murdered when he was just forty-eight, and I’m now...

Jan 18, 2019 — Dark Passages Getting old, in Hollywood, is at least a misfortune, if not a crime. But film noir had plenty of room for actors who looked the worse for wear, whose mileage showed on their faces, whose youth was less...