Women come together to make noise in these electrifying tales of girl bands defying the establishment, chasing stardom, and making their voices heard. From ferocious anthems of punk rebellion like LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FABULOUS STAINS to wildly satirical takes on fame and the music industry l...

Pulsing with operatic intensity and a furious moral vision all his own, the films of Abel Ferrara comprise one of the most fearless and uncompromising bodies of work in modern cinema. Emerging in the New York of the seventies, he used the grime and sleaze of the city’s margins as a backdrop to su...

More than a conventional actor, Madonna brings the full force of her own mythology—the raw magnetism, glamour, contradictions, and restless instinct for self-reinvention—to the characters she inhabits. In DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN, she updates the classic screwball heroine for the 1980s with effo...

In 1982, Susan Seidelman instantly established herself as one of the decade’s freshest cinematic voices when her debut feature, SMITHEREENS, became the first American independent film to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. A vividly gritty time capsule of downtown New York’s postpu...

The films of Darol Olu Kae assume a free-flowing, almost musical structure to tell richly textured stories of Black family, community, creativity, and inheritance, dissolving time to connect cultural memory to the living present. I RAN FROM IT AND WAS STILL IN IT interweaves archival fragments wi...

Heralded as “the Godfather of Asian American media,” Robert A. Nakamura was profoundly shaped by his childhood incarceration in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II, an experience that informed his lifelong exploration of identity, memory, and belonging through activist filmmak...

A quietly electric screen presence whose ability to convey simmering internal tension has made him one of his generation’s most respected actors, Paul Dano has delivered unforgettable performances for a remarkable roster of major directors, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Steve ...

Abel Ferrara’s documentary filmmaking channels the same mix of raw immediacy and heightened expressionism that drives his narrative work. From the vanishing traces of New York City’s downtown culture (THE PROJECTIONIST) to the gritty urban reality of Naples, Italy (NAPOLI, NAPOLI, NAPOLI), to the...

Born one hundred years ago this month, Shohei Imamura left behind a body of work chronicling a Japan transformed by war, occupation, and rapid social change, yet still governed by the most primal of human instincts. Though he began his career as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu, Imamura forged an exp...

One of contemporary cinema’s most perceptive chroniclers of fractured family bonds, Spanish director Carla Simón draws from her own complex history for this pair of empathetic, delicately observed portraits of girls growing up in the wake of profound loss. Infused with childhood memories, her lum...

When rock stars get the Hollywood treatment, the result is often a lackluster re-creation of their career’s most famous highs and lows. But the best musical biopics do more than just cover their subjects’ greatest hits, adopting unconventional modes of storytelling that go deeper than mere mimicr...

Set against the decaying grandeur of the American South, these sweltering sagas of family secrets, repressed desires, and twisted love are steeped in the region’s vibrant folklore and haunted history. Featuring adaptations of definitive southern writers like Tennessee Williams (BABY DOLL) and Fla...

The vast, arid landscapes of the American Southwest become hallucinatory expanses of existential reckoning in these sun-blasted journeys into a harsh, unforgiving no-man’s land. From the counterculture disillusionment of Michelangelo Antonioni’s ZABRISKIE POINT to the aching desolation of Wim Wen...

Urgent, eye-opening dispatches from the front lines of American class struggle, these galvanizing documentaries by Barbara Kopple—both winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary—are among the most essential films ever made about organized labor. Filmed over several years, HARLAN COUNTY USA...

Julien Duvivier was among the definitive craftsmen of classical French cinema, bringing expressive camera work, atmospheric mise-en-scène, and a darkly lyrical sensibility to often-overlooked jewels across an extraordinary array of genres. His deeply shadowed, fatalistic early sound films DAVID G...

In 1948, Gainsborough Pictures—best known for its enormously popular gothic melodramas—embarked on a rare prestige project: an anthology-film adaptation of four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham titled QUARTER, soon followed by two similarly structured follow-ups, TRIO and ENCORE. Featuring Br...

Like his acclaimed feature HAPPYEND, now streaming on the Criterion Channel, these short films by Neo Sora display both his keen eye for vivid cinematic details and ability to connect intimate human stories with broader social and political questions. While THE CHICKEN and A VERY STRAIGHT NECK ar...

In its midcentury heyday, Hollywood melodrama wallowed in blazing Technicolor, operatic plot twists, gloriously bad behavior, and even foul play. These films’ surging emotions push their characters toward outright violence, infusing the women’s picture with noirish thrills. In the hands of master...

With his lean, hangdog face and sunken, soul-weary eyes, Harry Dean Stanton—born one hundred years ago this month—was one of the all-time great character actors. He inhabited the cinematic margins for more than six decades, imbuing his portrayals of drifters, down-and-outers, mystics, and all-Ame...

Jonathan Demme moved fluidly across genres while maintaining an unmistakably humanist sensibility, from the kinetic screwball anarchy of SOMETHING WILD and MARRIED TO THE MOB to the restrained terror of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS to the overwhelming emotions of RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. Animated by u...

United by their roots in the alternative-comics underground, a shared love of eccentric Americana, and a misfit misanthropy that belies a cracked humanism, director Terry Zwigoff and cartoonist-screenwriter Daniel Clowes are uniquely well-matched collaborators. Adapted by Clowes from his own grap...

With his groundbreaking comics series “Eightball” and the acclaimed graphic novel “Ghost World,” Daniel Clowes brought the alternative-comics underground to mainstream recognition, channeling outsider alienation and an edgy humor steeped in the weirdo fringes of American pop culture. In this edit...

Now in its fifteenth year, the BlackStar Film Festival was established in 2012 to platform the voices of Black, Brown, and Indigenous artists who expand the possibilities of cinematic storytelling. Showcasing one film from each year of the festival’s history, this selection of highlights brings t...

Working defiantly out of Grand Rapids, Michigan, underground auteur Joel Potrykus makes scrappy, darkly comic portraits of the losers, slackers, metalheads, outcasts, and weirdos raging against the system as they struggle to get by on the margins of America’s heartland. Starring Potrykus himself ...