Directed by Lizzie Borden • 1976 • United States
Starring Kathryn Bigelow, Ariel Bock, Marion Cajori

While Lizzie Borden’s features BORN IN FAMES and WORKING GIRLS have taken their place as landmarks of feminist cinema, her debut—the fascinating experimental documentary REGROUPING—has gone large...

Directed by Claire Simon • 2023 • France

Timely, intimate, and deeply empathetic, OUR BODY observes the everyday operations of the gynecological ward in a public hospital in Paris. In the process, veteran documentarian Claire Simon questions what it means to live in a woman’s body, filming the d...

Directed by Reed Harkness • 2022 • United States

Sam Harkness was fourteen years old when his mother, Jois, abruptly disappeared. Tracking cryptic clues of her whereabouts years later, Sam and his half brother—director Reed Harkness, who has been making short films with Sam since childhood—head ...

Directed by Barbara Connell and Bill Jersey • 1966 • United States

With extraordinary access and unflinching frankness, this remarkable, underseen documentary offers an X-ray of the soul of a divided America working through the social shockwaves of the civil rights movement. The film chronicles ...

Directed by Shivendra Singh Dungarpur • 2018 • India
Starring Jiří Menzel, Antonín Máša, Dušan Hanák

This epic, indispensable work of cinema scholarship from archivist and filmmaker Shivendra Singh Dungarpur is a remarkable, in-depth portrait of director Jiří Menzel (CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS) and ...

Directed by Errol Morris • 2003 • United States
Starring Robert S. McNamara

This Oscar-winning documentary is a twentieth-century fable, the story of an American dreamer who rose from humble origins to the heights of political power. Robert S. McNamara was both witness to and participant in many...

Directed by Ira Deutchman • 2019 • United States
Starring Donald S. Rugoff, Elyce Bonnell, Peter Broderick

This illuminating, unexpected slice of forgotten film history tells the story of Donald Rugoff, who was the crazy genius behind Cinema 5, the groundbreaking midcentury theater chain and fil...

Directed by Nathaniel Kahn • 2003 • United States

Louis I. Kahn, who died in 1974, was one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century, but he left behind an illegitimate son, Nathaniel, and a personal life of secrets and broken promises. MY ARCHITECT takes us on a heartbreaking yet humo...

Directed by Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath • 2008 • United States

Codirected by acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras and subject Thavisouk Phrasavath, this haunting documentary chronicles a refugee family’s epic journey from Laos in the aftermath of the secret war waged by the United Stat...

Directed by Yevgeni Tsymbal • 2002 • Russia

The fascinating and tumultuous lives of Mikhail, Boris, and Denis Kaufman—the last better known as revolutionary Soviet director Dziga Vertov—are the focus of this illuminating documentary. All visionary artists who pushed the stylistic boundaries of c...

Criterion Collection Edition #123

Directed by David Maysles, Albert Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer • 1976 • United States

Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive relatives of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the dec...

Directed by Lionel Rogosin • 1956 • United States
Starring Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, Frank Matthews

Lionel Rogosin’s landmark of American neorealism chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York’s skid row, the Bowery. When the film ...

Directed by Leo Hurwitz • 1948 • United States
Starring Alfred Drake, Muriel Smith, Gary Merrill

In 1945, the free world rejoiced over the defeat of fascism. But the sense of peace was short-lived, and as the Cold War began, the United States entered a period of national paranoia and political r...

Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini • 1964 • Italy
Starring Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lello Bersani

Let’s talk about sex. In this radically engaged and engaging documentary, Pier Paolo Pasolini takes to the streets, town squares, beaches, factories, and universities of 1960s Italy to solicit everyday cit...

Directed by Agnès Varda • 2008 • France
Starring Agnès Varda

“If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.” Originally intended to be Agnès Varda’s farewell to filmmaking, this enchanting auto-portrait, made in her eightieth year, is a freewheeling journey...

Directed by Kent MacKenzie • 1961 • United States
Starring Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish, Tom Reynolds

A major work of American independent cinema, Kent Mackenzie’s revelatory fiction-documentary hybrid chronicles a night in the life of a group of twentysomething Native Americans who were relocate...

Directed by Jessica Beshir • 2021 • Ethiopia, United States, Qatar

A sublime work of trance-state cinema, the debut feature by the Mexican Ethiopian filmmaker Jessica Beshir is a hypnotic immersion in the world of rural Ethiopia, a place where one commodity—khat, a euphoria-inducing plant once p...

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot • 1956 • France
Starring Pablo Picasso

In 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot joined forces with his friend Pablo Picasso to make an entirely new kind of art film, “a film that could capture the moment and the mystery of creativity.” Together, they devised an innovative...

Directed by Manoel de Oliveira • 2001 • France, Portugal
Starring Jorge Trêpa, Ricardo Trêpa, Maria de Medeiros

With the freedom and rigor that were his trademarks, Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira returned to Porto, the city where he had been born ninety-three years before, for this sublime...

Directed by RaMell Ross • 2018 • United States
Starring Quincy Bryant, Daniel Collins

An inspired and intimate portrait of a place and its people, RaMell Ross’s HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING looks at the lives of Daniel Collins and Quincy Bryant, two young African American men from rura...

Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack • 1925 • United States

In 1924, neophyte filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack—later to achieve cinematic immortality as the makers of KING KONG—joined forces with journalist and spy Marguerite Harrison and set off to film an a...