Features

At the turn of the millennium, a loose collective of filmmakers—including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg—made a splash with a provocative manifesto and a wave of audacious movies shot on digital video.

While a film’s stars are forced to bear the responsibility of moving a narrative forward, supporting actors get to have fun providing comic relief or suggesting whole lives being lived beyond the screen.

Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.

Ring in 2025 with this selection of highlights from our past year in publishing.

Look back on the collaborations that defined our year, captured in this compilation of moments that our crew shared with the filmmakers, artists, and experts who talked with us about the movies.

Before she won acclaim as a pioneering director, the Hollywood icon made her name as a powerfully vivid actor who brought grit and toughness to films by such masters as Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Michael Curtiz.

Dennis Hopper’s bleakly nihilistic drama struggled to find an audience after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980, but time has revealed it to be one of the most hardcore films about disaffected youth ever made.

From Kaneto Shindo to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the masters of the genre over the past half-century have tapped into a deep well of cultural anxiety, exploring everything from the sins of their nation’s feudal past to the dangers of new technologies.

The director of such classic political docudramas as On the Bowery and Come Back, Africa defied the conventions of nonfiction filmmaking with his innovative approach to collaboration and performance.

This once-maligned horror film is an unsparing exploration of sexual violence, remarkably centered on a complex, fully realized female protagonist, played courageously by Barbara Hershey.

At a time when women were understood to be the primary audience for movies, Hollywood studios built vehicles for actresses that doubled as showcases for the industry’s many brilliant female screenwriters.

With their virtuosic celebrations of death, giallo films reflect the air of paranoia and fear that haunted Italian society in the 1960s and ’70s, a period when the country was undergoing dramatic, violent changes.

This year, Bologna’s annual feast of restorations and rediscoveries showcased one of the most ambitious masterpieces of the silent era, the melodramas of Japanese filmmaker Kozaburo Yoshimura, and other treasures of film history.

In the late 1980s, filmmakers Gregorio Rocha and Sarah Minter set out to capture the rebellious subculture of youth in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a slumlike suburb synonymous with the worst failures of urban expansion in Mexico.

The great actor creates an unforgettable portrait of a man worn down by the world in Tamara Jenkins’s darkly funny and deeply moving family drama.

The monumental forty-film box set CC40 celebrates forty years of the Criterion Collection with an electrifying mix of classic and contemporary films, and presents them with all their special features and essays.

Made in an era when self-consciously postmodern takes on the Bard were popular, Gus Van Sant’s melancholy road movie mines the ambiguously queer tensions in the history play Henry IV.

During a tumultuous period in New York’s history, movies like Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and Shaft found excitement and squalor in one of the city’s most infamous tourist attractions.

At their best, movies that showcase a sizable collective of virtuosic actors can give you the feeling of a rich ecosystem being brought to life.

A collection on the Criterion Channel charts the evolution of the synthesizer—from its infancy in the 1950s to its maturity in the 1980s—and its transformative impact on film music.

An underrated figure of Japanese cinema’s postwar era, the director tackled a wide range of subjects over his long career, including corporate double-dealing, government espionage, and various forms of fanaticism.

Perhaps the most hard-to-categorize of the great Hollywood studios came into its own with a string of critically acclaimed films based on popular books and plays, including Born Yesterday, A Raisin in the Sun, and From Here to Eternity.

From After Hours to Mikey and Nicky to Collateral, movies centered on the twists and turns of a single night give filmmakers the chance to boldly experiment with cinematic time and space.

In this early-career gem from one of the most beloved Japanese animation directors of all time, an extravagant sci-fi narrative is anchored by the transcendent power of young love and poignant observations of modern life.