Storied auteurs are seen through the lens of fellow filmmaking greats in these revealing director-on-director portraits that stand as distinctive works of art in their own right. Whether it’s Agnès Varda filming a walk with Pier Paolo Pasolini through 1960s Time Square, Ken Jacobs turning fellow ...

Kinuyo Tanaka was already one of Japan’s greatest actors—celebrated for her collaborations with auteurs like Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, and Mikio Naruse—when she took an unprecedented risk by embarking on a directing career in a studio system that actively discouraged female filmmakers. The s...

The roots of Taiwanese-cinema titan Hou Hsiao-hsien’s celebrated artistry are on display in this selection of early films that traces the evolution of his storytelling approach. While the charming romantic comedies CUTE GIRL (his feature debut) and THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME show tantalizing ...

Sound and vision come together in perfect harmony in this dynamic selection of music-driven shorts. Encompassing jazz (THE CRY OF JAZZ, KEEPING TIME), folk (SPROUT WINGS AND FLY), soul (SHAKE! OTIS AT MONTEREY), opera (THE MUSIC OF REGRET), and the unclassifiable genre unto herself that is Björk ...

Founded in 2019, the Dweller festival celebrates the Black roots of electronic dance music, spotlighting a lineage of trailblazing musicians, producers, and DJs who created the sound that spread to clubs across the world and amplifying the contemporary artists who carry on their legacy. This dive...

Experimental icon Shirley Clarke synthesized jazz, modern dance, and abstract expressionism into a dynamic vérité style that put her at the forefront of the emergent American independent film scene of the fifties and sixties. Beginning her artistic career as a dancer, she brought a choreographer’...

Hong Kong is home to one of the world’s most exciting pop-filmmaking traditions—and there’s no bigger event in its box-office calendar than Lunar New Year, typically reserved for the industry’s most crowd-pleasing releases. These genre-blending touchstones bring audiences together for an escape i...

Get in the mood for love with a Valentine’s bouquet of shorts that celebrate passionate human connection in its many forms. Featuring gems from past masters like John Hubley (TENDER GAME), Pierre Etaix (HAPPY ANNIVERSARY), and Shirley Clarke (SAVAGE/LOVE) as well as insightful contemporary looks ...

As an ever-expanding online archive, This Long Century has published hundreds of unmediated personal reflections from artists, filmmakers, and writers over the past fifteen years. This eclectic selection of films by a small group of past This Long Century contributors—including Kelly Reichardt, A...

For four decades, the Sundance Film Festival has been at the heart of American independent cinema, providing a vital launching pad for up-and-coming filmmakers wholly committed to their singular artistic vision. From acclaimed features by maverick directors like the Coen brothers (BLOOD SIMPLE), ...

The films of Bertrand Tavernier are suffused with his love for cinema. In addition to being one of France’s foremost auteurs, Tavernier was also a film critic and historian who drew from his deep knowledge of classic French and American cinema to create his own uniquely absorbing, finely wrought ...

“I’m drawn to women with secrets,” says acclaimed Filipina director Isabel Sandoval, who toys with genre conventions in her subversive portraits of women tangled up in complex sociopolitical realities. A true auteur, Sandoval wrote, produced, directed, and starred in her feature debut, SEÑORITA, ...

From gorgeous hand drawing to playful stop motion, dreamlike pinscreen to exquisite silhouette shadowplay, a dazzling array of techniques is on display in this miniature animation celebration. Including bite-size masterpieces by visionary animators such as Lotte Reiniger (PAPAGENO), John and Fait...

Mark Lewis makes nature films like you’ve never seen before. In their strangeness, all the sublimity, absurdity, and incomprehensibility of the animal world—especially where it intersects with human society—comes into fascinating and wryly humorous focus. It’s little wonder that Werner Herzog is ...

In 1954, an enormous beast clawed its way out of the sea, destroying everything in its path—and changing movies forever. The arresting original GODZILLA soon gave rise to an entire monster-movie genre (kaiju eiga), but the King of the Monsters continued to reign supreme: in fourteen fiercely ent...

A stocking stuffer of holiday shorts captures both the magic of the season and the melancholy of what can be the loneliest time of year. From a cozy stop-motion treasure (A CHRISTMAS DREAM) to striking early works by renowned auteurs like Lynne Ramsay (GASMAN), these by turns festive, funny, and ...

Criterion Collection Edition #1030

This compilation of five early short films by Martin Scorsese offers a fascinating window onto his artistic development. Spanning the years from Scorsese’s time at NYU in the mid-1960s to the late ’70s, when he was emerging as one of the era’s most electrifying...

The search for identity is at the core of Colombian-Canadian director Lina Rodriguez’s intimate, richly impressionistic films. Informed by her own immigrant experience, her narrative features like SO MUCH TENDERNESS and THIS TIME TOMORROW and her acclaimed documentary MY TWO VOICES capture women ...

Wormholes to more wormholes, the continually surprising audiovisual essays of Morgan Quaintance draw incisive connections between the most seemingly disparate of subjects—see how his quietly radical MISSING TIME moves, almost imperceptibly, from a consideration of New Hampshire alien abductions a...

Over the last decade, Third Horizon has established itself as a champion of exceptional Caribbean cinema rooted in the region’s locus as a global crossroads of both history and geography, a pivot around which the old world became the new, and a harbinger of an intersectional future ravaged by col...

Frequently working in defiance of state censorship, Lou Ye has emerged as one of the edgiest and most controversial of China’s Sixth Generation of filmmakers. Singled out for praise by his contemporary Jia Zhangke, Lou belongs to a cohort of artists who have forged a subversive, radically persona...

Though his filmography to date consists of only three features and a dozen or so acclaimed, eclectic short films, Dustin Guy Defa has carved out a unique niche as one of American independent cinema’s most intriguing and defiantly unorthodox auteurs. Interested, above all, in people and their rela...

Celebrating the drop-outs, slackers, bohemians, and misfits who live in opposition to the mainstream, the freewheeling, blissfully batty films of punk auteur Masashi Yamamoto are gonzo transmissions from the fringes of the Japanese underground. Defiantly DIY rebukes to the capitalist excesses of ...