Features

In the 1970s, up-and-coming mavericks like Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter honed their craft by bringing a taste of the grindhouse to the small screen.

Classics of highway horror, like Road Games, The Appointment, and Race with the Devil, present the open road as a dangerous landscape and automobiles as single-minded killing machines.

To get you in the mood for Halloween, we invited a group of six writers and filmmakers to tell us about horror movies on the Criterion Channel that they feel deserve more attention.

The serial killer in Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning film remains a powerfully influential and dominant trans film image with a complicated legacy that cannot be taken lightly.

Anchored by an extraordinary performance from Sandrine Bonnaire, the epic historical drama Joan the Maid strips away its saintly protagonist’s mythic aura and gives us a humbler, more intimate version of her life story.

The elegantly crafted portmanteau films Quartet, Trio, and Encore adapt twelve spellbinding tales of deception and passion from one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century.

A Japanese-television phenomenon that sparked a boom in anime production and fandom, Hideaki Anno’s magnum opus is a mind-bending mix of kinetic action, sci-fi spectacle, and introspective human drama.

The illuminating 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine follows the celebrated author on a journey through the American South, as he attempts to reckon with the legacy and losses of the civil rights movement.

In Kidlat Tahimik’s playful and unpredictable film, a Philippine village is tasked with manufacturing thousands of figurines for the Olympic Games, upending the lives and customs of the local population.

The members of this influential leftist collective created a formally adventurous body of work that examined the nation’s tumultuous history through a postcolonial lens.

In one of his greatest performances, the celebrated actor shows off his range by fusing the two modes that defined his career: the misanthropic provocateur and the soulful survivor-witness.

A characteristically rebellious work from the Czechoslovak New Wave pioneer, Wolf’s Hole explores the perilous absurdities of groupthink through the story of eleven youths held captive at a skiing retreat.

A labor of love made for cheap in its director’s Manhattan apartment, this audacious queer fantasia endures not only because of its frank sexuality but also its gentle, honest heart.

A keen and patient observer who has taken her camera to such far-flung destinations as Peru, Laos, and Uganda, the acclaimed filmmaker immerses viewers in unfamiliar situations that highlight the fluid dynamics of human interaction.

In His Girl Friday, The Apartment, and other classic films about love in the workplace, Hollywood grappled with the evolution of American sexual politics and the glories and pitfalls of professional achievement.

In this delirious and deeply polarizing satire about political violence, the legendary director takes aim at hypocrisy and opportunism at every level of German society.

In a trio of Hollywood crime dramas made in the 1940s and ’50s—including the masterpiece Out of the Past—the director follows wayward characters who venture into profoundly unsettling landscapes and encounter the foreign at home.

During a period of rapid deregulation and deindustrialization, Hollywood corporate thrillers depicted ambitious heroes gaining admission to a world of C-suites and private jets at the price of their souls.

The first documentary feature about the rock legends, Charlie Is My Darling captures the band as a group of consummate musicians coming into their fame, fully committed to their craft and enjoying one another’s company.

In her riveting documentary Mistress Dispeller, Elizabeth Lo crafts a vividly cinematic exploration of love, marital infidelity, and a drastic form of professional intervention that has become popular in contemporary China.

Since the 1980s, Indigenous artists have turned to documentary filmmaking and a variety of experimental forms to reassert their cultural sovereignty and lay claim to their own narratives.

Though in many ways the quintessential company man, the director brought an intimate understanding of the margins of American society to the films he made for Warner Bros. in the 1930s.

In a collection of behind-the-scenes documentaries now playing on the Criterion Channel, legendary female performers assert their agency over their screen personae and find freedom in the glamour and artifice of their profession.

As we come to the end of 2025, we’re looking back at some of the essays and interviews we’ve shared with you over the past year.