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 ...

Playful, absorbing, and deeply inquisitive, the films of Onyeka Igwe turn to the archives to challenge official narratives and excavate hidden histories. Whether tracing fragments of her own family history in THE NAMES HAVE CHANGED, INCLUDING MY OWN AND TRUTHS HAVE BEEN ALTERED, reimagining antic...

The sultry, vivacious Cuban-born star Ninón Sevilla reigned as queen of the Mexican cine de rumberas, a genre that deliriously fused noir, melodrama, and musical spectacular. Sevilla lit up the screen playing fallen women caught between virtue and vice in films built around the kinetic, high-volt...

A leading Buddhist teacher and lama, Bhutanese auteur Khyentse Norbu is a cinematic philosopher whose visually ravishing, spiritually profound films feel at once ancient, radically contemporary, and thrillingly alive. TRAVELLERS AND MAGICIANS reframes the road movie as a meditation on fantasy and...

The road of return is studded with adventure, discovery, and surprise in these tales of epic quests that draw on one of literature’s most enduring narrative archetypes: the journey back home. Whether traversing the hardscrabble highways of Depression-era America (SULLIVAN’S TRAVEL, O BROTHER, WHE...

A performer of rare volatility and range, Courtney Love brings a feral intelligence and bruised glamour to the screen, meriting a place in cinematic culture alongside her hallowed stature in music. In films, Love is not merely an icon crossing mediums; her work with auteurs like Alex Cox (STRAIGH...

The legend of cinema’s most iconic superspy begins here, with the trio of films that turned writer Ian Fleming’s suave secret agent James Bond into a global phenomenon. Featuring Sean Connery’s still-unmatched portrayal of 007—equal parts danger, charm, and wit—DR.NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, and G...

With wedding season upon us, take a walk down the aisle of some of cinema’s most unforgettable nuptials. Focusing on the lead-up to and spectacle of the big day itself, these films dramatize the often-conflicting dreams, desires, and fears that bring two people together before the altar, with dir...

A patron saint of punk cinema and borderless storytelling, Alex Cox remains one of the greatest subversives to ever pick up a camera, a rebel auteur who blends gonzo surrealism, anarchic irreverence, and blistering anticapitalist and anti-imperialist critique. From the radioactive deadpan of the ...

Sexy, surreal, and darkly stylish, the short films of French director Yann Gonzalez (KNIFE+HEART) capture ecstatic moments of human (and sometimes beyond human) connection, merging throbbing eroticism with a charge of giallo-like menace to probe the inextricable links between love, sex, death, an...

From the cities we live in to the products we use every day to the typefaces we communicate through, how do the subtle but impactful forces of design shape our lives? That’s the question at the heart of the illuminating documentaries of Gary Hustwit (ENO), who invites us to see the world around u...