Overlooked for too long, Paulin Soumanou Vieyra (1925–1987) should be seen as one of the most important and influential figures in the development of African cinema. Born in Benin and later based in Senegal, Vieyra was one of the first Black Africans to direct a film, AFRICA ON THE SEINE, a movin...

Stories of self-discovery, self-acceptance, and the simple but radical, often dangerous act of just existing as a queer person are on display in these empathetic and innovative shorts, which reflect the wide spectrum of experiences that make up the LGBTQ+ rainbow.

When the 1968 edition of the Cannes Film Festival opened amid widespread civil unrest, filmmakers began pulling their movies from the schedule in solidarity with the workers and students protesting across France. This series gathers select titles from the year’s official lineup, alongside a scene...

Hailed for her vibrant explorations of culture clash and connection in films like MONSOON WEDDING and MISSISSIPPI MASALA, Indian American auteur Mira Nair has pursued an equally distinguished career as a director of short films that further explore the ways in which deep-rooted cultural tradition...

French director Jacques Demy didn’t just make movies—he created an entire cinematic world. Demy launched his glorious feature filmmaking career in the sixties, a decade of astonishing invention in his national cinema. He stood out from the crowd of his fellow New Wavers, however, by filtering his...

A pair of Hollywood exiles—she was a former script clerk at Columbia, he was an ex–Disney cartoonist and union activist blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee—Faith and John Hubley left behind the mainstream to forge a thrillingly experimental ani...

These exuberant and inventive Oscar-nominated shorts span animated, documentary, and fiction work, including eye-catching early films by Andrea Arnold, Richard Lester, and Shirley Clarke. At an awards show often dominated by stars and industry titans, the short-film Academy Award categories tend ...

Toronto-based filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s intimate, essayistic shorts muse on family, grief, femininity, and humans’ relationships with animals, often with exquisitely touching vulnerability. Deeply personal—she frequently appears in her own films and incorporates her own family’s history and photo...

Shocking, confrontational, and made with white-hot fury, these radical documentaries—directed by Kazuo Hara and produced by his wife and longtime creative partner, Sachiko Kobayashi—give voice to the outsiders and iconoclasts who wage war with the conformism of modern Japanese society. From a wom...

With her Academy Award–nominated documentary TIME, Garrett Bradley confirmed her place among the most original and poetic voices working in the realm of nonfiction today. Her richly sensorial visual style and incisive blending of the personal and the political are on display in these remarkable s...

Montreal-based filmmaker and multimedia artist Caroline Monnet combines striking, often abstract visuals and evocative soundscapes to explore Indigenous identity, the reverberations of colonialism, and hidden cultural histories. Encompassing an inspiring portrait of a Chippewa mixed martial artis...

There has never been another artist like Ulysses Jenkins. For over fifty years, the Los Angeles–born and –based polymath has produced an expansive and unclassifiable body of work that tackles, in idiosyncratic and often wickedly humorous ways, thorny issues of race, gender, national history, and ...

Criterion is thrilled to partner with Le Cinéma Club for this selection of cutting-edge contemporary short films. A free and curated online cinema, Le Cinéma Club streams one film a week, celebrating a new generation of filmmakers and uncovering inspiring discoveries from the past. This program g...

No one makes movies like Claire Denis, one of contemporary cinema’s foremost masters. Raised in colonial West Africa, Denis apprenticed as an assistant to Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders before striking out on her own in the late eighties in an entirely original cinematic language shaped by her outs...

Emerging from the freakiest fringes of the 1960s counterculture, Robert Downey Sr. took the American underground cinema by storm with his wild, weird, and way-out-there send-ups of everything from sex to race relations to religion. In this tribute to one of his filmmaking heroes, acclaimed cinema...

An infectious sense of joy lights up the documentaries of George T. Nierenberg, whose films are essential records of African American cultural achievement. With his touchstone documentary NO MAPS ON MY TAPS and its follow-up ABOUT TAP, Nierenberg helped to revitalize interest in the art of tap da...

Environmental-art superstar Christo, who passed away in May this year, and his longtime collaborator, Jeanne-Claude, transformed the world’s landscapes into epic canvases for their awe-inspiring site-specific installations. Though their staggering achievements—including an enormous curtain hung b...

Black Lives Matter, and art has a role to play in centering and celebrating the experiences of black people. These films focus on the dreams, struggles, desires, and art of black characters and real-life subjects. From rediscovered gems by mavericks of early African American cinema like Oscar Mic...

The boy wonder who became the great, wandering titan of international cinema, writer-director-actor and all-around force of nature Orson Welles began his filmmaking career with some of the most dazzling and innovative opuses ever made within the Hollywood studio system—but his vision was always t...

Of all the cinematic New Waves that broke over the world in the 1960s, the one in Czechoslovakia was among the most fruitful, fascinating, and radical. With a wicked sense of humor and a healthy streak of surrealism, a group of fearless directors—including Miloš Forman (THE FIREMEN’S BALL), Vera ...

Just as postwar disillusionment infiltrated American pop culture and found its way to Hollywood in the form of film noir, so it did in Japan, where a wave of edgy, existential crime dramas spread like a shadow across the Land of the Rising Sun. With STRAY DOG, Akira Kurosawa applied the chiaroscu...

Marcello Mastroianni made being a movie star look effortless, wearing his suave good looks and worldly sophistication with a sly, self-deprecating lightness that was perhaps only matched by his American counterpart, Cary Grant. Though he will forever be remembered for his immortal collaborations ...