Over the course of six features, Kelly Reichardt has established herself as one of American cinema’s sharpest observers of place and character. Beautifully attuned to the in-between moments of everyday life, her films such as OLD JOY, WENDY AND LUCY, and MEEK’S CUTOFF portray the journeys and str...
Criterion Collection Edition #893
The expanses of the American West take center stage in this intimately observed triptych from Kelly Reichardt. Adapted from three short stories by Maile Meloy and unfolding in self-contained but interlocking episodes, CERTAIN WOMEN navigates the subtle shifts in...
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...
Criterion Collection Edition #953
With this bracing drama, made at the climax of the anti-apartheid movement, director Euzhan Palcy issued a devastating indictment of South Africa’s racist government—and made history in the process, becoming the first black woman to direct a Hollywood studio ...
“Since I don’t do psychoanalysis, I do cinema,” explains Athina Rachel Tsangari, who, over the last decade, has become one of the foremost figures of the so-called “Greek Weird Wave”—a movement characterized by its fascination with human behavior, bitingly absurdist humor, and arresting visual st...
Directed by Joan Micklin Silver • 1977 • United States
Starring John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum
Inspired by director Joan Micklin Silver’s time working at New York’s storied alt weekly the “Village Voice,” this unsung gem of 1970s slice-of-life seriocomedy offers an incisive, bitterswe...
Directed by Jacqueline Audry • 1951 • France
Starring Edwige Feuillère, Simone Simon, Marie-Claire Olivia
Neglected for nearly seventy years, a singular landmark of lesbian cinema by one of France’s trailblazing women directors reemerges. Plunging the viewer—and the main character—into a lion’s ...
Emerging from the avant-garde underground of the 1970s and ’80s, Bette Gordon made her mark with stylishly subversive investigations of sexuality and gender roles that invert genre expectations with their feminist themes. Following a string of groundbreaking experimental shorts—including the stru...
Directed by Jamie Babbit • 1999 • United States
Starring Natasha Lyonne, Clea DuVall, Melanie Lynskey
One of the definitive queer classics of the late nineties, this cult favorite balances hilariously campy satire with sweet romantic comedy. Natasha Lyonne stars as Megan Bloomfield, a bubbly, al...
In 1979, poet Adrienne Rich observed that “one of the most powerful social and political catalysts of the past decade has been the speaking of women with other women, the telling of our secrets, the comparing of wounds and sharing of words.” Curated by guest programmer Nellie Killian, Tell Me cel...
Directed by Leilah Weinraub • 2018 • United States
Charting the eight-year run of Shakedown, a peripatetic black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles, director Leilah Weinraub attempts “to portray the before and after of a utopic moment.” Weinraub presents a world unto itself, shaped by the desires...
One of the boldest cinematic visionaries of the past half century, Chantal Akerman—who would have turned seventy this June—took a profoundly personal, aesthetically radical approach to the form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and alienation. Influenced b...
With her breathtaking feature debut, ATLANTICS, French-Senegalese filmmaker Mati Diop has emerged as one of contemporary cinema’s most bracing and distinctive voices. Her singular vision is on full display in her extraordinary short films, intricate, mysterious documentary-fiction hybrid works th...
The inventive, self-reflexive films of independent trailblazer Cheryl Dunye offer multilayered, sharply funny commentaries on the intersections of black and queer identity. Over the course of six provocative, sardonic shorts, Dunye honed a unique, quasi-documentary style she dubbed “Dunyementary,...
Directed by Rungano Nyoni • 2017 • Zambia, United Kingdom
Starring Maggie Mulubwa, Nellie Munamonga, Dyna Mufuni
The acclaimed debut feature from Rungano Nyoni is a daring, sharply satiric feminist fairy tale set in present-day Zambia. When nine-year-old orphan Shula (Margaret Mulubwa) is accuse...
In her smart, bitingly hilarious, and deeply empathetic comedies, Nicole Holofcener offers refreshingly nuanced portrayals of flawed, complex women whose outward sophistication belies their dysfunctional, often disastrous personal lives. All featuring her regular collaborator Catherine Keener, th...
Directed by Shirley Clarke • 1967 • United States
Starring Jason Holliday
On the night of December 2, 1966, Shirley Clarke and a tiny crew convened in her apartment at the Hotel Chelsea to make a film. For twelve straight hours, they filmed the one-and-only Jason Holliday as he spun tales, sang,...
In a career spanning five decades, French filmmaker Diane Kurys has mined the raw material of her own life and family history to create richly realized portraits of female relationships that overflow with wit and warmth. This selection features her effervescent feature debut, PEPPERMINT SODA, a g...
Directed by Eliza Hittman • 2013 • United States
Starring Gina Piersanti, Jesse Cordasco, Giovanna Salimeni
As her latest film, the 2020 Sundance and Berlin award winner NEVER RARELY SOMETIMES ALWAYS, garners critical acclaim, the Criterion Channel revisits the revelatory debut feature from dire...
For almost three decades, Frances Marion was Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter (male or female), a pioneer who shaped the nascent art of script writing and whose seemingly boundless imagination yielded some of the most unforgettable words and stories ever put on screen. Like fellow trailblaze...
Directed by Camille Billops and James Hatch • 1982 • United States
One of the many films that Camille Billops and James Hatch made centering on Billops’s family, SUZANNE, SUZANNE presents a devastating portrait of the artist’s niece, haunted by the abuse she suffered as a child and the passivity...
Directed by Maya Angelou • 1998 • United States
Starring Alfre Woodard, Al Freeman Jr., Esther Rolle
The only film directed by the iconic writer, poet, and activist Maya Angelou is a warm, richly evocative celebration of black southern family and resilience. Alfre Woodard delivers a brilliant pe...
Criterion Collection Edition #957
Elaine May crafted a gangster film like no other in the nocturnal odyssey MIKEY AND NICKY, capitalizing on the chemistry between frequent collaborators John Cassavetes and Peter Falk by casting them together as small-time mobsters whose lifelong relationship has...
Directed by Anna Rose Holmer • 2015 • United States
Starring Royalty Hightower, Alexis Neblett, Da'Sean Minor
Eleven-year-old tomboy Toni (a showstopping Royalty Hightower) is bewitched by the tight-knit dance team she sees practicing in the same Cincinnati gymnasium where she boxes. Enamored by...
