Cassie da Costa is an editor and writer. You can find her work in Vanity Fair, Artforum, the New Yorker, and elsewhere.

With his candid portraits of musicians and political figures, this trailblazer of observational cinema redefined the documentary form and popular culture at large.

Jul 11, 2023 — In her audacious debut feature, Cheryl Dunye blends romantic comedy and staged archival material to explore love, friendship, and early U.S. cinema’s history of exclusion.

Jun 29, 2021 — In Dee Rees’s ambitious and lyrical debut, the inner life of a queer Black teenager and poet is summoned in all its nuances and contradictions.

Nov 15, 2016 — This week’s Short + Feature program on the Criterion Channel pairs D.A. Pennebaker’s three-minute experimental Daybreak Express and Ronald Neame’s feature comedy The Horse’s Mouth.

Sep 22, 2009 — A new era in popular music deserves a new era in filmmaking—that’s the basis of the perfect, fortuitous match-up between rock and cinema in D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film.

Nov 12, 2025 — In this Sundance-award-winning exploration of war and memory, writer Cathy Linh Che shines a spotlight on her parents, who were Vietnamese refugees living in the Philippines when they were cast as extras in Apocalypse Now.

Aug 21, 2023 — Channel Calendars This September, the Channel welcomes you back to school . . . where something sinister is afoot. Our High School Horror collection brings together cult classics and teen-slasher favorites for a bloodcurdling look at the scary side of...

Jan 1, 2022 — Ring in the new year with the French New Wave, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and a look back at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival.

Jul 23, 2021 — Deep Dives In later years, Buster Keaton referred to his signing of a contract with MGM as “the worst mistake of my career.” In 1928 it was purely a business decision. The last few films he had made for his own...