A Year’s Worth of Essential Reading

As we come to the end of 2025, we’re looking back at our past year in publishing and the articles we’ve shared with you—including essays on outstanding supporting performances, the history of the Vietnam War on-screen, the legacy of Nigerien-cinema pioneer Moustapha Alassane, and underappreciated films by Robert Altman, as well as interviews with a few of our Criterion Channel guest curators. Enjoy this selection of highlights, and check back for new articles in February, when we return from our winter hiatus!

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.

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

To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the director of Three Seasons discusses a selection of landmark films that have shaped how we remember this devastating and divisive conflict.

The acclaimed crime writer joins a producer of the 1999 adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley to discuss the cinematic incarnations of Patricia Highsmith’s shape-shifting, quintessentially American antihero.

Throughout a small but indelible body of work that includes the 1984 neorealist masterpiece Bless Their Little Hearts, the veteran filmmaker has explored how everyday life is lived within structures of power.

From Grosse Pointe Blank to Singles to Trainspotting, some of the decade’s most memorable fusions of music and cinema brought underground culture to new heights of pop consciousness.

In such provocative delights as Jamón jamón and Golden Balls, one of Spain’s most original directors celebrates the sensual pleasures of food and sex while capturing the rapid changes his country experienced at the turn of the millennium.

To celebrate Robert Altman’s centennial, we invited five writers to each explore a favorite lesser-known gem from the great director’s filmography.

One of the most provocative subgenres of 1970s exploitation cinema, nunsploitation explores the collision of sex and religious dogma through stories of desperately horny women of the cloth.

The self-trained filmmaker examined postindependence Nigerien society in morality tales that showcased his visual ingenuity and sly sense of humor.

Through the interlocking stories of its sprawling cast of characters, this ravishingly beautiful television series explores a turning point in the history of the legendary director’s birthplace.

The critic and curator talks about working on a program of films by trailblazing Black women directors, which opened at London’s BFI Southbank this May and later premiered on the Criterion Channel.