Feb 3, 2017 — Over on the Criterion Channel, for Super Bowl weekend, we’re showing the first football movie ever made, Harold Lloyd’s crackerjack comedy The Freshman (1925), and the first rugby-football movie ever made, Lindsay Anderson’s heart-pounding drama This Sporting Life (1963). And...

Dec 23, 2017 — Let’s first take a quick break from 2017 and look back fifty years (as I suspect we’ll be doing a lot in 2018). For Little White Lies, Justine Smith has been rifling through various archives and has put together a...

Nov 26, 2010 — Early in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, as the wind from the Texas plains whips the small town of Anarene, the high-school senior Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) halts his recalcitrant pickup truck—Hank Williams is warbling “Why Don’t You Love...

Apr 20, 2012 — Cabbage soup for the soul.

Mar 13, 2018 — Jim Cummings’s Thunder Road has won Grand Jury Award in the 2018 SXSW Narrative Feature Competition, and Hao Wu’s People’s Republic of Desire takes the Grand Jury award in the Documentary Feature Competition. Here’s the complete list of winners with...

May 25, 2018 — Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times best-selling essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor; How Did You Get This Number; and the novel The Clasp. A...

Michael Harriot is an award-winning writer, founder of the journalism collective ContrabandCamp.com, and author of the New York Times best seller Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the New York Times best-selling author of the critically acclaimed speculative novels Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade and Shadow, Signal to Noise, Certain Dark Things, and The Beautiful Ones; the crime novel Untamed Shore, and the noir...

Aug 8, 2025 — This week: Edward Yang, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and alternative lists of the best films of the twenty-first century.

Jun 27, 2025 — We’re revisiting 1975, reassessing 2025, and reading about Serge Daney and Hong Sangsoo.