Directed by John Lurie • 1992 • United States
John Lurie knows absolutely nothing about fishing, but that doesn’t stop him from undertaking the adventure of a lifetime in FISHING WITH JOHN. Traveling with his special guests to the most exotic and dangerous places on earth, John Lurie battles sha...
The films of Bertrand Tavernier are suffused with his love for cinema. In addition to being one of France’s foremost auteurs, he is also a film critic and historian who draws from his deep knowledge of classic French and American cinema to create his own uniquely absorbing, finely wrought works. ...
One of the driving forces of contemporary Argentine cinema, director Pablo Trapero delves into his country’s gritty underbelly with heart-racing immediacy. Plunging fearlessly into a women’s prison (LION’S DEN), the corrupt mean streets of Buenos Aires (CARANCHO), and Argentina’s shantytown slums...
Emerging from the explosion of Black cinematic creativity known as the LA Rebellion, Zeinabu irene Davis combines narrative storytelling and a range of poetic experimental techniques to give voice to African American women’s experiences of love, joy, struggle, and self-realization. Her sublime fe...
With their blend of earthiness and dreamlike surrealism, the films of Federico Fellini dominated mid-twentieth-century art-house cinema. Though he began his career as a screenwriter for the neorealist titan Roberto Rossellini, Fellini quickly developed his own personal, poetic style in early triu...
Cary Grant may have been classic Hollywood’s ultimate embodiment of suave sophistication, but thankfully he never took himself too seriously, as seen in these comedy classics that showcase his inimitable flair for farce. A former acrobat who was as adept at delivering sparkling banter as he was a...
Chance meetings between strangers spiral out of control in two chilling visions of racial violence and communication breakdown. First, a misunderstanding between three juveniles and an unstable man escalates past the point of no return in Montreal-based Ivorian-Ghananian filmmaker Will Niava’s in...
One of the greatest showmen the cinema has ever seen, actor, producer, and director Raj Kapoor became a Bollywood icon thanks to his ability to blend comedy, pathos, and musical spectacle into rousing, deliriously entertaining underdog tales that spoke to the hopes and dreams of a newly independe...
Beamed straight from his id to your eyeballs, the kaleidoscopic, mind-enhancing visions of Terence Nance swirl surrealism, Afrofuturism, animation, and confessional documentary into exhilaratingly unclassifiable works of free-form abstraction. In his ecstatically innovative feature AN OVERSIMPLIF...
Actor, activist, exercise guru, businesswoman, star of Hollywood hits and French art-house cinema alike—Jane Fonda has worn more hats than just about any performer of her generation and continues to be an outspoken fighter for social and environmental justice. Though she was born the daughter of ...
Coined in 1994 by critic Mark Dery, the term “Afrofuturism” has become an essential framework for art about imagined and alternative Black experiences. As the author Ytasha Womack writes, “Afrofuturism combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy, Afrocen...
Comic chameleon Peter Sellers famously claimed to have no personality of his own. Instead, he saw himself as the medium through which his characters, which include some of the most memorable in all of twentieth-century cinema, were brought to life. Having pioneered a distinctly British brand of a...
Queen of the risqué double entendre Mae West said it best herself: “When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.” The singular performer, playwright, sex symbol, and all-around star had brass and brilliance to burn in her ascent from vaudeville vamp to scandal-inciting Broadway sen...
The cosmic rhapsodies of Terrence Malick are spoken of with a hushed reverence. Each of these rarefied masterpieces ruminates profoundly on the connection between humanity and the natural world, seeking out transcendence in the landscapes of America’s past. This trio of touchstone works—his subli...
As Korean pop culture continues its worldwide ascent, now is a perfect time to catch up with the wild, genre-defying pleasures of the seemingly unstoppable movement known as the New Korean Cinema. Bringing together essential works by major directors like Bong Joon Ho (THE HOST), Park Chan-wook (S...
New York City–based French filmmaker Marie Losier captures the freewheeling energy of the avant-garde underground through her playful, lovingly handmade 16 mm portraits of boundary-pushing musicians, artists, and performers. Her acclaimed feature documentaries THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE,...
One of the most influential playwrights of the twentieth century brings his celebrated Pinter pauses and anxious ambiguity to the screen in these masterful dramas that quiver with quotidian menace. Having conquered the British stage with landmark works like THE BIRTHDAY PARTY and THE CARETAKER, H...
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...
There are legends . . . and then there is Barbra Streisand. A trailblazing triple threat, Streisand not only left her mark on the countless films she starred in, she has also directed three acclaimed features, all of which she produced as well. It took fifteen years to bring her passion project, ...
The sole member of his family to survive the Cambodian genocide, documentarian Rithy Panh has devoted himself to exorcising the traumas of his country’s past through the cathartic power of cinema. These profoundly moving works—the Academy Award–nominated THE MISSING PICTURE, which recreates the l...
It came from a land down under . . . From the early seventies through the mideighties, a resurgence of government funding for national film production gave birth to a generation of brave, unconventional new voices who made Australia the home to a brief but bright-burning cinematic renaissance. Am...
Watching a film by Rick Alverson can be a singularly uncomfortable experience—but just try to look away. Refusing to conform to tidy narrative arcs and conventional notions of “likable” characters, Alverson creates transgressive, confrontational, tragicomic portraits of masculinity in crisis that...
The beautiful boy of French cinema whose steely, ice-blue gaze betrayed more than a hint of danger, Alain Delon was a favorite of modernists like Luchino Visconti, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Michelangelo Antonioni, all of whom were seduced by his impossible good looks and air of cool detachment. T...
Filmmaker, gay-rights activist, poet, professor, provocateur: the late, great Black artist Marlon Riggs (1957–94) spoke truth to power through his work in bracingly eloquent fashion. Working at the height of the AIDS crisis and the conservative culture wars of the 1980s and early ’90s, Riggs—who ...
