Now ninety-six years old, director Michael Roemer was always ahead of his time—and at last, after decades of neglect, the world is catching up to his profoundly humanist, unfailingly truthful vision. A Jewish refugee who escaped Nazi Germany as a child, Roemer has made only a handful of features,...

Working across narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, and interactive cinema, Ayoka Chenzira brings the inner worlds of Black women—their hopes, dreams, anxieties, and struggles—to life with heart, humor, and insight. An all-around creative force, she made her mark as an animator with a...

Confronting both the specter of World War II and the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, these stunning late-career triumphs from Japanese iconoclast Nobuhiko Obayashi offer a subversive, typically idiosyncratic reflection on national history and tragedy. Replete with the boldly ...

Everyday reality slips into surrealist reverie in the uncanny visions of Sara Driver, whose films possess the hallucinatory textures and hypnotic rhythms of a waking dream. A central but often overlooked linchpin of the 1980s downtown New York arts scene, Driver made her directorial debut with YO...

These stylistically radical, bracingly contemporary films offer new ways of seeing Philippine myths, pasts, presents, and futures. Making innovative use of digital technologies, extreme color grading, and unexpected aspect ratios, a new generation of young Philippine filmmakers explodes genre con...

Horses and foxes and snails, oh my! The wide, wild world of animals is on parade in a menagerie of wondrous, playful, affectionate shorts, which span silent and sound, documentary and fiction, live action and animation. From mammals to birds to reptiles to mollusks, creatures great and small, cud...

Revolutionary in both content and form, the films of Lizzie Borden testify to the potential of a politically committed cinema to fight back against prevailing representations of women on-screen. Her first three features—the long-unavailable experimental documentary REGROUPING, the dystopian sci-f...

The audacious, coolly spellbinding films of French virtuoso Bertrand Bonello—whose THE BEAST is currently rampaging toward an art-house theater near you—first seduce with their sleekly stylized surfaces, then pull the rug out from under you with their subversive, provocatively open-ended critique...

Working across both documentary and narrative, Cameroonian auteur Rosine Mbakam makes intimate, exquisitely observed portraits of West African women both at home and abroad that illuminate their inner lives with quiet force. In her early shorts DOORS OF THE PAST and YOU WILL BE MY ALLY and in her...

With an undeniable screen presence that’s at once moody, intense, and a bit mysterious, Kristen Stewart continues to fascinate as one of the most unique and consistently surprising actors of her generation. This trio of films from Stewart’s post-blockbuster career reinvention finds her bringing h...

One of the most creative and galvanizing venues for film exhibition to emerge during the pandemic, Prismatic Ground is a festival centered on the intersection between experimental and documentary film. This selection of shorts from its first three editions, in April 2021, May 2022, and May 2023, ...

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...

Director of some of the most provocative and uncompromising films to emerge from the women’s-liberation movement, Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris explores questions of gender, sexuality, and violence—and the links between the three—with startling boldness. Her first three features—A QUESTION OF SI...

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...

Throughout 2024, the Criterion Channel will be celebrating the centennial of one of American cinema’s essential studios. Founded on January 10, 1924, Columbia Pictures quickly rose from its humble beginnings to take its place at the forefront of golden-age Hollywood, where it was home to stars su...

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...

A perfect storm of rhythm, bass, melody, and political and spiritual messaging, reggae was born in Jamaica in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and has since gone on to become one of the most influential, popular, and genre-exploding forms of music around the globe. The first classic reggae film, Pe...

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), ...