Considering what he’s up to, though, it’s odd that he keeps insisting on his anonymity. The first thing we see Joshua actually do is cross a street in Los Angeles’s Little Russia. There are palm trees in the background, but the sky is as gray and dreary as it will be throughout the film. He walks up to an older man sitting on a bench and puts a bullet into him. A paid assassin who shoots people in broad daylight can’t necessarily count on going unnoticed. And yet Joshua, who always walks with his shoulders hunched against the wind whether or not one is blowing, is capable of committing homicide in public without anyone in his vicinity raising an eyebrow.

Despite what seems to be his knack for murdering with impunity, Joshua won’t emerge from the film unscathed. The protagonist is about to be sent across the country, setting into motion a drama of profound alienation and violent reckoning. Having accomplished his task in LA—“It’s done,” he says into the receiver of a pay phone—Joshua is immediately charged with another. The target of the assignment is an Iranian jeweler in Brighton Beach, also known as Little Odessa, the neighborhood in New York City where Joshua grew up. “Brooklyn’s no good for me, you know that,” he says, maybe trying not to sound too peeved so that he stays on his overseer’s good side. But his boss reminds him: “You owe us a debt.” As it turns out, Joshua owes several.

In these first scenes, we get a sense of how painstakingly distilled this movie is, in a way that very few debut features are. The inexorability of Gray’s films has been likened to that of Greek tragedies, and from the opening moments of Little Odessa, the misery to come is already in the air. The film is also akin to more than one Old Testament narrative—stories about fathers and sons, about brothers. Joshua’s destiny begins to collide with that of his estranged family when, against his will and better judgment, he skulks back to Brighton Beach, at the end of the B subway line, a quick transfer to Coney Island proper. In some noteworthy recent films, including Sean Baker’s Anora and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, the neighborhood is busy as a hive with reprobates, hustlers, con artists, and other criminal types, but in Little Odessa it’s dark, furtive, skeevy, and mostly cold. Gray shot the film during a particularly brutal winter, and the dirty snowbanks we see are perfect correlatives for the movie’s mood.

Amid this desolate landscape, the crime-film trappings of the opening are revealed to be a feint of sorts, for Little Odessa is ultimately an intimate tragedy in which Joshua must confront crucial figures from his past. Joshua’s reunions begin with his teenage brother, Reuben (Edward Furlong), who first appears on-screen in a repertory cinema watching a not terribly distinguished western called Vengeance Valley, starring Burt Lancaster. The picture gets stuck in the projector gate, causing its frames to melt, but Reuben shrugs it off and leaves without getting a refund or seeming to care that he’s missing the film’s ending. His inclination to roll with such punches suggests that he’s accustomed, in a way, to living life in suspension, aimlessly. When he gets home, he absconds with a piece of mail from the local board of education, no doubt pertaining to his truancy.

One afternoon, Reuben is working his father’s newsstand when wannabe neighborhood tough guy Sasha (David Vadim) comes by, demands cigarettes for the inside dope he’s about to lay on Reuben, and tells him that his brother’s back in town. Soon Reuben is looking for Joshua in a Queens hotel. Joshua, when he turns up, has one thing to say: “Get out of here.” It’s not safe, he tells Reuben. Nevertheless, Joshua can’t help himself. He sizes the kid up with affection, pulling off his wool cap. Then Reuben tells Joshua that their mom is dying, not knowing that he’s laying the foundation for a still greater catastrophe.

A native New Yorker, Gray has returned to Brooklyn many times throughout his career, and his depiction of the borough has a bone-deep credibility. His path to filmmaking, though, began in Los Angeles, where he has now lived for many years. He studied film at the University of Southern California, and his thesis project impressed producer Paul Webster, who approached him about making a feature. There was nothing in Gray’s quiver at the time, but Webster said that was no problem, that he should go ahead and write something. In Nathan Heller’s 2019 New Yorker profile of Gray, the director recalls Webster suggesting that he tell “the story of your relationship with your family, but add a genre hook.” When I spoke to Gray in 2024, he explained how much the film drew from his personal experiences: “I had met somebody I based Tim Roth’s character on . . . The mood of that apartment was the mood of my house in that period of my life.” The Russian hit men whom Gray had encountered in his youth were not “home cooks like the Italian mob guys in Goodfellas.” Rather than “colorful” characters, “they were actually sociopaths and psychopaths.” Dead souls, one might say.

The drilled-down quality of Little Odessa reminds me of a saying in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” The film’s narrative thrust is well served—no, is actually defined—by Gray’s sense of purpose. This is a movie he needed to make. These are characters he needed to bring to life. The urgency that propels the film is heightened by its sense of realism and local detail, combined with a directness that has led some critics to describe Gray as a classicist. His visual style here is marked by the resolute perspective of his camera, which may have arisen in part from necessity—even in 1994, a budget of a little over two million dollars didn’t invite stylistic indulgence. And while some of the most startling imagery in Gray’s future films, like the final shot in 2013’s The Immigrant, does look as if it took some doing, the accomplished but much more unadorned imagery in Little Odessa hardly lacks for immediacy. Gray never averts his gaze, no matter how painful the scene.

Behind the camera was cinematographer Tom Richmond, who brought with him both a keen eye and a wild-man reputation. Gray once recalled that he didn’t quite know what to make of Richmond during preproduction, particularly when he repeatedly announced, “I’m going to be the camera.” But with Richmond’s intense commitment established, the filmmakers developed a strong rapport. Gray was grateful for the elder man’s generosity; the director was only twenty-four years old at the time, and the DP encouraged Gray as he insisted on choosing lenses and adjusting lighting setups.

There’s a key passage about twenty minutes into the picture that serves as a beautiful example of their collaboration. While Joshua is still antsy about people knowing that he’s back in Brooklyn, he has gotten more comfortable spending time with Reuben. The sequence begins with an almost surreal shot of three pristine white gulls hovering in a gray (of course) sky, followed by a view of a Coney Island street covered in snow. The brothers are enjoying maybe the only real moment of reprieve they’ll share in this story, and all around them is the dead of winter. Richmond’s camera is so acutely perceptive that you can practically feel the cold. Joshua is tearing into Nathan’s french fries; Reuben’s got a frank. Joshua interrogates Reuben, casually teasing the kid: Was he bar mitzvahed? Did he get a lot of money? Does he have friends? Reuben shrugs, and Joshua kicks him playfully. They both throw their trash over onto the beach. Of course these guys would be litterbugs.

Joshua getting goofy with his kid brother is a strangely sweet sight, but the joy can’t last. One of the movie’s most punishing ironies is that things begin to go terribly wrong once Joshua decides to act as his brother’s keeper, even as he tries to maintain a relative distance. In the next scene, the protagonist carries Reuben’s bike up the stairs to the family’s apartment. Richmond and Gray’s framing of the ensuing near-showdown—in which patriarch Arkady (Maximilian Schell, perfectly understated even in rage) balks at Joshua’s presence—is startling. In a 1997 interview, Roth said the film is about “a family where the devil has gotten into their house.” Compounding the calamity, of course, is that this devil belongs to the family. (Though the domestic conditions of Gray’s youth were not quite as extreme, he experienced a good amount of family unrest; his father, a businessman, was indicted on multiple counts of fraudulent activity, and his mother was dying of brain cancer while he was in college.) In future Gray films, brothers will reconcile (as in 2007’s We Own the Night, where the peace is terribly hard-won), and a son will find a father as well as the revelation and/or resolution that said father could not (in 2016’s Amazon-set epic The Lost City of Z and in 2019’s space-exploration drama Ad Astra). Such moments of catharsis and reconciliation do not even present themselves as flickers in this picture.

No relationship in Little Odessa is easy. Joshua looks up an old girlfriend, Alla (Moira Kelly), and her first words to him are “What do you want from me?” “I wanted to see you,” he tells her. “But I didn’t do anything,” she says, as if a curse has been delivered to her. Nonetheless, she later lets him make love to her, and the way he physically handles her is odd—a kind of aroused tenderness teetering on the edge of brutality, as if she’s an alien life-form. True connection sometimes seems to be just a pipe dream.

A wide vein of melancholy runs through this concise, diamond-hard film, whose riches are abundant. Among them are the remarkable performances that Gray elicits from his cast, a splendidly luminous one for a first-time director to be gifted with. As Irina, the incredible Vanessa Redgrave conveys the constant pain of the cancer that’s killing her character without ever overtly expressing it. Schell depicts the self-delusion of someone who finds himself impotent wherever he turns, until he discovers he can be quite horrifically powerful as a betrayer. Furlong and Kelly represent two different kinds of innocence betrayed. Paul Guilfoyle, as the mobster Volkoff, is as lizardlike as the reptiles Joshua and Reuben check out on a visit to the New York Aquarium. And Vadim, as the flunky Sasha, is eye-rollingly clueless.

Gray is attuned to idiosyncratic, lived-in detail in every part of the film. There’s the mordant humor of a missing prosthetic leg; the cramped, smoky quarters of the social club where Joshua enlists his comrades to carry out his next assignment; the crying of the jeweler as he’s about to be killed, and Joshua’s merciless remark—“Wait ten seconds and see if God saves you.” By presenting the execution in silhouette, Gray spares us gore but not destruction. His gaze is steadfast to the end, as Joshua does what needs to be done in the wake of multiple senseless shootings, without shedding a tear. His near-ritualistic shrouding and burning of a body reflects his determination to leave no trace. Joshua knows that he has just committed acts even more unspeakable than what he has been used to committing for a living. And now he seems to have a quiet awareness that he has annihilated himself—and is condemned to keep walking the earth anyway.

Given the devastation Joshua leaves in his wake, his words early in the movie take on a terrible irony. Brooklyn’s no good for him? Turns out it’s even worse for those he loved, and those he tried to love.

The film follows workers at a Hormel Foods meat-processing plant in Minnesota as they negotiate with management and then go on strike from 1985 to ’86. As she had for Harlan County, Kopple lived in the community during the production, and she served as her own sound recordist in a two-person crew, working alongside a 16 mm cinematographer. They were continuously cash-strapped, relying on grants and donations that trickled in. The harsh winter on the picket line was agonizing, and so were the stories unfolding on camera. We witness union members turn on one another as their convictions diverge, over whether to go on strike in the first place and, later, over whether to stay on strike or cross the picket line. Families and friendships are torn apart. While Harlan County is a case study in solidarity, American Dream captures the anguish and perils of disunity.

Like Harlan County, the film debuted at the New York Film Festival and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. But otherwise the two had different trajectories. Harlan County USA had played in theaters across the country, becoming a breakthrough success for documentaries at the time. After premiering in 1990, American Dream saw a more limited release in 1992. In the decades since, Kopple has noted, Harlan County USA was more frequently sought for retrospective screenings. But as I write this in May 2026, American Dream has been restored and rereleased, and new audiences are experiencing it as a revelation. It lands amid fresh upheavals in the labor market against the backdrop of the gig economy, wholesale corporate embrace of AI technology, and ever-widening disparities in wealth.

I got to see American Dream during its theatrical release, just a couple of years before I would enter the documentary field myself, part of a midnineties generational wave beckoned by the possibilities of new digital video technologies. In the same way that All the President’s Men had brought about a rise of investigative journalists in the seventies, Harlan County USA and American Dream were key inspirations for budding doc makers in the nineties. Kopple’s approach, of embedding herself in a community midcrisis and filming under conditions where nothing was guaranteed—not access, not safety, not narrative resolution—was bracing. It showed us how documentary film could capture history while it was being lived. I can point to countless films released in the late nineties and the aughts that were motivated by her example, including Oscar-nominated works such as The Farm: Angola, USA; On the Ropes; Capturing the Friedmans; Street Fight; Deliver Us from Evil; and Jesus Camp. Especially for women who wanted to direct, Kopple stood out as a rare example. Hollywood’s institutional barriers in that era were formidable, and they’ve barely improved.

Nonfiction filmmaking itself has undergone seismic transformations in the decades since. Distribution has moved from art‑house cinemas to global streaming platforms. As documentaries have become more visible and commercially viable, they have also become more tightly managed, with predefined arcs, beats, and emotional payoffs. The experience of watching American Dream today is exhilarating partly because it is the antithesis of this way of thinking. It is in a tradition of observational cinema that Kopple learned when working on Gimme Shelter (1970) with Albert and David Maysles, two of the originators of Direct Cinema, and, as part of the antiwar Winterfilm Collective, on Winter Soldier (1972).

For me, as a Midwesterner, Kopple’s work on the Hormel strike hit especially close to home. During the mideighties, when the film takes place, I was coming of age in Detroit’s suburbs and witnessing an economic crisis all around me. For much of the twentieth century, industrial labor had underwritten the American dream. At the height of union power, in the fifties and sixties, these jobs provided pathways for working-class people to the kind of stability and prosperity associated with being middle-class, including homeownership, health insurance, and the ability to send kids to college. You wouldn’t have called the relationship between owners and workers equitable, but it at least felt reciprocal.

That equilibrium was unraveling by the seventies. Inflation, globalization, automation, and financialization were eroding industrial employment. Executive compensation soared as wages stagnated. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked a tipping point. Despite his earlier leadership of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan cast organized labor as an obstacle to growth. His decision to fire more than eleven thousand striking air traffic controllers in 1981 sent a signal. CEOs grew even bolder about demanding concessions and punishing resistance.

The archipelago of industrial cities in the Northeast and Midwest once known as the Steel Belt was now dubbed the Rust Belt. Those of us living there witnessed the transformation, as factories closed and storefronts, from urban downtowns to small-town Main Streets, were boarded up. Places engraved in our families’ histories were being shuttered at an alarming rate, accompanied by an existential dread that no one could stop the spiral. This was an experience I seldom saw evoked on a movie screen. One notable exception was Roger & Me (1989), the satirical documentary by Michael Moore, who grew up in Flint, Michigan. American Dream offered a different kind of validation. Kopple was an Oscar-winning New Yorker, and she was dedicating her talents to showing why this story mattered.

American Dream unfolds in Austin, Minnesota, a small city, surrounded by cornfields, whose civic identity is inseparable from Hormel, which is headquartered there. In the 1930s, company founder Jay Hormel oversaw the creation of Spam, a low‑cost canned meat that became a wartime staple and a symbol—perhaps ironic—of American industrial ingenuity. After his death in 1954, Hormel was remembered locally with nostalgia, as an employer who had honored an implicit social contract between labor and management.

By the early eighties, that contract had begun to fray. No longer family-run, Hormel was increasingly beholden to its shareholders. In 1984, despite posting nearly $30 million in profits, management announced a painful wage cut for meat-packers—from $10.69 an hour to $8.25. For workers whose bodies bore the marks of years spent inside the slaughterhouse, it felt like a betrayal.

Kopple’s camera takes us inside the plant to show precisely what labor that wage buys. Hogs are stunned, hoisted, disassembled. Their carcasses are carved into portions that will later appear shrink‑wrapped and cheerful in grocery aisles. The work is brutal, repetitive, and dangerous. We can see the physical toll and guess at the psychic cost. Harlan County similarly showed the bodily impact of coal mining. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t ignore it.

The first main figure we meet is Jim Guyette, president of Local P‑9, the union representing Austin’s meat-packers. He’s a third‑generation Hormel employee in his thirties. Local P-9’s members voted him into leadership for his willingness to fight, in contrast to prior leaders who were more conciliatory with management. The film begins as the calendar is running out on P-9’s previous contract. Guyette feels he needs more leverage to face Hormel’s hardball negotiators, so he recruits the New York–based labor consultant Ray Rogers, who earned a name for himself working on the late-seventies textile-workers campaign dramatized in the film Norma Rae. Rogers uses confrontational tactics and media events in an effort to win popular support for unions. He devises a strategy for union supporters to hold demonstrations outside the headquarters of a key Hormel stockholder, First Bank of Minnesota.

Throughout this process, Kopple captures the mood swings within the P-9 community. Hormel workers hadn’t been on strike since 1933. During meetings at the union hall, we witness diverging opinions. Some members are fired up. Others are skeptical about whether Rogers’s approach is working. The film skillfully interweaves a range of voices that foreshadows greater tensions ahead.

The dynamics grow more fraught when the film reveals that Guyette and Rogers face another source of friction from within the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union—Local P-9’s parent organization. We meet Lewie Anderson, the chain-smoking UFCW negotiator who represents tens of thousands of meat-packers nationwide, including members at plants making far less than Hormel’s workers. Anderson believes it’s the wrong time for hardball tactics. He’s convinced that Local P-9’s tactics are counterproductive and will further weaken the already fragile position of the union’s members throughout the country.

Kopple’s access to these men is extraordinary. She captures meetings thick with tension, where strategy collides with ego and adrenaline. Each figure is granted dimension, dignity, and contradiction. I couldn’t help wondering whether she’d held her own judgments about them or any of their strategies. “No, I was drawn to all of them,” she told me. “I felt so unbelievably lucky that I was able to tell their stories.”

Time itself becomes a central character in the film, wearing down resolve and exposing fault lines. We see the majority of the P-9 membership vote to go on strike in August 1985, against the advice of the UCFW. As the strike drags on, Kopple shows us how the jubilance and camaraderie of the union members give way to the grinding realities of winter on the picket line and households that have to be sustained without a Hormel paycheck, along with doubts about whether they can outlast management. The company shifts production elsewhere, then eventually reopens the plant with replacement workers. One of the film’s most poignant story lines follows two brothers, R.J. and Ron Bergstrom, both Local P-9 members, who find themselves in different camps and, ultimately, on opposite sides of the picket line. R.J. remains loyal to Local P‑9, while Ron loses faith in Guyette’s approach. Ron belongs to a splinter group of Hormel workers who wish Local P-9 had followed the advice of Anderson instead of Rogers. Kopple sits down with several of these members to hear their perspectives. Late in the strike, one normally stoic man breaks into tears as he describes the shame he feels at not being able to provide for his family. But emotions run high on both sides. At one point, R.J. tells a TV reporter of Ron, “He won’t be my brother if he crosses the line.”

Peter Gilbert, Kopple’s main cinematographer on American Dream, told me, “That was such an education, how Barbara treated everybody with this beautiful grace and dignity, no matter if she believed your side or not. I learned from her that the real importance of documentary is not which side you’re on. It’s more about presenting a gray area somewhere in the film, where people who are on opposing sides can connect and have a conversation.”

Today I sense a growing curiosity from a younger generation about organized labor. Maybe it coincides with the popularity of Bernie Sanders. Maybe it’s the strength in numbers that people feel in grassroots movements such as #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or Debt Collective. Maybe it’s the inspiration of organizing Amazon workers, as captured in the 2024 documentary Union. Whatever the source, I wasn’t feeling that same zeal among young liberals of my generation when American Dream came out. Unions felt parochial, unglamorous, even vaguely regressive. On college campuses in those days, you were more likely to find solidarity groups for distant causes—the anti‑apartheid movement in South Africa, revolutionary struggles in Central America—than for working‑class communities closer to home.

When I recently shared that impression with Kopple, she disagreed. “Labor has always been out there,” she told me. “Your father worked in a union, or your grandmother or somebody else. It’s always of interest to people.” I think Kopple is expressing a parallel truth. As we can clearly see in American Dream, she was engaged with a full-fledged movement of demonstrations, news coverage, and high-profile advocates like Jesse Jackson. But perhaps none of that was reaching my generation, many of whom grew up taking middle-class gains for granted.

Kopple didn’t approach the Hormel strike as an allegory or a case study. She went to Middle America and stayed there. She filmed people whose politics were mixed, whose values were contradictory, whose grievances were rooted in economic survival rather than ideology. In doing so, she asked her audience to sit with individuals they might otherwise dismiss or overlook. In the decades since, she has continued to apply these filmmaking practices, rooted in her social consciousness and talent for patient observation, spanning topics that include transgender expression, the experiences of war refugees, and voter activation. Two highlights of her later work for me are Shut Up & Sing (2006), about the band formerly known as the Dixie Chicks as they mount a comeback from controversy, and Miss Sharon Jones! (2015), about the soul singer as she mounts a comeback from cancer.

It makes sense that one of the people who immediately grasped the importance of American Dream was Studs Terkel, the legendary Chicago oral historian and author of Working. Terkel devoted his career to amplifying the voices of ordinary Americans. He hosted Kopple on his radio show for the film’s release. “It has Greek-tragic aspects to it. Only it’s not the gods that did it. Here, it’s a company and a union‑busting climate,” he said. “For me it’s the film—feature or documentary—of the past ten years I’ve seen. And I’ll remember this long after I’ve forgotten every extravaganza.”

“I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society.”

Hara Kazuo

This collection represents the finest work to come from the partnership between director Hara Kazuo and producer Kobayashi Sachiko. Together, they have created a diverse body of films that marks a turning point in post–World War II Japanese documentary. Indeed, their work helped drive this transformation, while also influencing documentarians around the world. The five films gathered here span the breadth of what I think of as two Hara Kazuos: Hara 1 and Hara 2. They have an interdependent relationship—one is unthinkable without the other. Each is always secreted inside the other. Hara 1 centers on spectacular, edgy personalities, and Hara 2 is embedded in collectives under duress.

Interestingly, these two phases can be seen as corresponding to two fiction filmmakers in Hara’s life; he served as an assistant director for both, and they deeply impacted his thinking about the world and cinema. In a 2017 interview, Hara told Joel Neville Anderson about these two mentors, Imamura Shohei and Urayama Kirio. Both encouraged him to concentrate on people and to elevate their humanity, but in seemingly incompatible ways. Imamura told him that people are “cowardly, they’re lecherous, they’re cheap, they’re immoral—and that’s what makes them interesting.” By contrast, Urayama told Hara to focus on the proletariat in order “to make the lives of the downtrodden and the weak better, and bring happiness to them.” This conflicting advice is at the heart of the two Haras.

The director’s reputation, particularly outside of Japan, is almost entirely built around his first handful of films—what I am calling Hara 1: Goodbye CP (1972), Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 (1974), The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), and A Dedicated Life (1994). These are works that are profoundly inflected by Imamura’s earthy anthropology or, as the fiction filmmaker famously put it, “the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure.” Each of the above films pivots around a charismatic individual’s body. And to one degree or another, each involves a struggle over directorial control.

In contrast to this, there is the more challenging Hara 2, who emerges in his works of the new century. Here he embeds himself—and the viewer—in groups of regular folks engaged in struggles and in need of advocacy: the weak and downtrodden people that Urayama encouraged Hara to support. This mode is epitomized by Sennan Asbestos Disaster (2016).

This arc is fascinating in relation to the larger backdrop of Japanese cinema. Postwar documentary was dominated by filmmakers allied to massive social movements, such as those protesting American military bases, nuclear weapons, industrial pollution, and the Vietnam War. This trend is best represented by Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s Minamata series (on mercury poisoning caused by chemical-factory wastewater) and Ogawa Productions’ Sanrizuka series (on the epochal protests against the construction of Narita Airport). Around the turn of the century, this kind of collective, politicized 16 mm filmmaking was eclipsed by essayistic, personal films that were often made by single directors with consumer camcorders and without crews. Amid these historical developments, Hara always chose to push against the prevailing currents.

Hara had initially aspired to a career in still photography, and to that end entered the Tokyo College of Photography. He decided to leave that path for motion pictures because “photography only allowed me to get to know people on a superficial level.” This was his starting point, in the wake of the failed 1970 protests against the security treaty that kept Japan under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and amid the newly extreme militancy of the Japanese Red Army. However, he rejected radical collectivity to embark on profoundly personal films as a lone, maverick, independent director. Decades later, as those political collectives gave way to young filmmakers making private documentaries, Hara, always the contrarian, turned to collectivities, traversing the historical arc backward.

He navigated this path with his life partner, Kobayashi Sachiko. When they met, he took the role of director and she producer, and their practice formed around a deep collaboration that has spanned more than half a century. The Hara I’ve known over the decades is a funny and charming figure. Possessing an almost aggressive curiosity, he is both an incessant talker and a listener who leans into every conversation with total concentration. He’s also a mess. “I’m a ball of complexes,” he told critic Nicolás Carrasco, and indeed he is. By contrast, Kobayashi is self-deprecating and strikes one as anxious and flighty at first glance. In fact, I’ve found she has nerves of steel, and her steady brilliance is what has ultimately made Hara’s films possible. It is a partnership of strange and wonderful complementarity.

Getting Personal

Hara Kazuo and Kobayashi Sachiko’s first work depicted people living with cerebral palsy (CP). From a certain perspective, this places it among the movement documentaries of disability activism, such as the powerful films of Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Yanagisawa Hisao, which elevate their subjects in an aura of purity and innocence. However, Goodbye CP was something entirely new: an unsentimental portrait of the daily life of a poet with the disease, Yokota Hiroshi, his body and voice cruelly distorted as if trapped in eternal agony. He argues with his wife, gets drunk with his disabled friends. In a society going to great lengths to hide the disabled, he crawls across city streets buck naked. The film offers a frank visual and aural representation of the damage the disease wreaks on the human body. Scholar Phil Kaffen has pointed out that this film forces spectators to think about their own bodies in relation to the bodies on-screen. He argues that Hara is not “building easy bridges or . . . erecting insurmountable barriers. Instead, the various excesses of the film push viewers into an uncomfortable in-between space, a deep chasm without rope or ladder in which we must wade through the muck of their own sensibilities, knowledge, perception of their own bodies, and understanding of film and documentary.” Faced with not only the struggles of the physical handicap but also the indignity of being disregarded by the “normal” people surrounding them, Yokota and his friends are shown in a new, taboo-breaking light.

Two years later, Hara again sent a shock wave through the Japanese film community with Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974. The documentary chronicles something of a love triangle between Hara, Kobayashi, and Hara’s ex-wife, Takeda Miyuki. It’s an unlikely situation. Kobayashi was, at the time, both the director’s lover and producer. As for Takeda, she proves to be a force of nature—a feminist activist interested in both men and women, and not only Hara’s former lover but also the mother of his child. The film centers on the spectacular life and personality of Takeda, but it is really about her tangled, three-way relationship with Hara and Kobayashi.

Extreme Private Eros’s most powerful setting is the environment where Takeda is living, near a military base on the island of Okinawa, so the film skirts the edges of the anti-American base movement as well as contemporary feminism. However, the focus is singular, or perhaps I should say triangular. The film is, as the title announces, extremely personal. Takeda allows the other two to enter the deepest, most private spaces of her life, but she is no mere object of scrutiny. Hara appears entranced by Takeda’s mercurial and unpredictable behavior as she throws herself into life, berates this filmmaker from her past, and cajoles Kobayashi into her world. The relationship between the three comes to a head during the most intimate of moments, the home birth. Hara had long promised to shoot Takeda’s home birth and fulfills his promise halfway through the film. The delivery is without complications, but Hara’s nervousness is registered in the camera’s lack of focus. Takeda then encourages Kobayashi, who is also pregnant, to follow her lead and give birth on the kitchen floor. Shot long before the age of home video, this extraordinary scene is the culmination of their complex, intersubjective relationship—with Hara’s camera work, Takeda’s instructions, and Kobayashi’s cries. It is with this film that the individualized stance of Hara 1 comes into sharp focus: a director turning his camera on a charismatic individual while revealing his own messy individuality, all orchestrated by an equally strong, if quiet, woman in the background.

Truth and Violence

In Hara Kazuo’s third feature, the award-winning The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, he and Kobayashi Sachiko take a back seat while his subject essentially commandeers the film. This remains the best documentary about the Second World War in the Pacific, and the best exploration of documentary’s relationship to violence and ethics. Five years in the making, the film traces a quest for truth by Okuzaki Kenzo, a survivor of the battlefields of New Guinea who is now on a crusade to abolish Japan’s emperor system. The veteran had initially approached Imamura Shohei, who was unnerved by Okuzaki’s behavior and passed the project on to Hara and Kobayashi. Okuzaki had a vendetta against Emperor Hirohito and any vets who harbored no regrets about fighting for the imperial cause. He proudly admitted that he had shot pachinko balls at the royal family, distributed pornographic images of the emperor, and once killed a man who tried to swindle him. When Hara and Kobayashi embarked on the film, they doubtless knew that they were in for some drama.

Although generally understood as an antiwar film, The Emperor’s Naked Army is profitably seen as a struggle over the souls of the war dead. The film centers on Okuzaki’s determination to reveal the truth behind an incident involving his old unit: twenty-three days after the war ended, two low-ranking Japanese soldiers were executed for “desertion” under very mysterious circumstances while Okuzaki was away in a prison camp. Visiting the surviving members of his unit one by one, the vet slowly uncovers what happened. Along the way, his interview tactics escalate from verbal abuse to physical violence. Okuzaki is motivated by a desire to soothe the souls of the two victims, and while he is encouraged by their surviving family members, his search is stymied by fellow veterans who tell him to stop for the sake of the two men’s spirits. The Emperor’s Naked Army is thus a pragmatic antiwar film that takes on a surprising metaphysical dimension.

The film was inspirational for Michael Moore, who serendipitously walked into a movie theater playing the film, having been seduced by the title. Moore was editing Roger & Me (1989) and was racked by insecurities about his interventional approach. The Emperor’s Naked Army rocked his world. He found in Hara a “kindred spirit” who was also searching for a way to make documentaries that didn’t numb his spectators. I brought the two directors together to finally meet onstage in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Moore told Hara, “I felt after watching that film that I had permission—I gave myself permission—to make Roger & Me the way I was making it.”

Moore found The Emperor’s Naked Army attractive mainly for its strategy of provocation. However, over the years, it has become the test case for documentary ethics. Hara’s tolerance for his subject’s violent tactics has enabled a lively and ongoing discussion about the stakes of nonfiction filmmaking. The film, as documentarian Errol Morris has said, “makes you think about the incredible power of truth-seeking.” This is a power that necessitates a self-consciousness around the ethics of every filmmaking decision. Near the end of the film, Hara and Kobayashi discover the redline they were unwilling to cross with Okuzaki. The question for every spectator is where they’d draw their own redline.

Farewell to the Individual

Hara Kazuo and Kobayashi Sachiko’s next film, A Dedicated Life, is their final documentary centered on an individual personality. In this case, it’s the famous novelist Inoue Mitsuharu, a Marxist from the far west of Japan. He came to national prominence when his People of the Land (1963) was nominated for a major prize. Hara and Kobayashi catch Inoue toward the end of his life, when he was holding seminars with his fans. Most of them were older women. Some of them he was sleeping with. Considering their previous work, it is clear why Hara and Kobayashi were initially attracted to Inoue. He had a big personality and a quirky lifestyle. However, in the course of shooting, they discovered that Inoue’s biography was itself fiction. As they uncover one lie after another, the film transforms into a meditation on fiction, documentary, and truth. And Inoue raises the stakes of all these questions by revealing his terminal cancer diagnosis.

This film in particular casts new light on Hara’s previous work by demonstrating how all the profound issues in documentary cinema pivot around the human body. Actual human bodies racked by disease, giving birth, fighting each other, undergoing surgery—different sets of ethical quandaries spin around these bodies and their representations on film. Hara has thought deeply about this:

I like action films, so I often use the phrase action documentary. What I mean is this: Let’s say I begin by initiating things . . . Those who are provoked take in my words and filter them through their bodies, then take action. I believe that to take action with your body means to see things that you would otherwise not be able to see—and to see things is better than not to see things. The flip side is I also want to be provoked. All the time . . . I need to be stirred up . . . I want to take action with my body, because a body that takes action is a wonderful thing . . . Therefore, our films are not action movies: they are action itself.

A Dedicated Life is thus not only the final but one of the key films of Hara 1, a group of works that are ultimately defined by this concentration on individual bodies moving through the world. These films are portraits of individual passion set against grand sociopolitical backdrops. The lives of these exceptionally captivating figures are shambolic and vulgar, and, like Hara, we cannot help but find them frightening, frustrating, and seductive all at once.

A Commitment to Confrontation

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, young filmmakers like Kawase Naomi hit the scene, following Hara Kazuo’s example of the extremely personal documentary by working in a form often called the “self-documentary” or “private film.” These filmmakers shared Hara’s lack of interest in radical political movements, but they did not have the older director’s curiosity about the messiness of the world and its people. Their films were divorced from, or ignorant of, politics. While Hara was seen by many as this movement’s progenitor, it’s a terribly thin comparison, as the young filmmakers tended to focus on the personal because it was a safe space. In contrast, Hara’s “personal” was always raked by the social, the political, and the historical. And Hara was deeply attracted to risk.

Finding himself increasingly frustrated by these young filmmakers, he and Kobayashi Sachiko began turning away from charismatic individuals to collectives. They started to follow and simultaneously shoot three groups of regular citizens engaged in righteous fights against industry and government cruelty. Their Reiwa Uprising (2019) is about a newly formed political party with a menagerie of spectacular characters, while their epic Minamata Mandala (2020) tracks the ongoing legal battles over Minamata disease.

However, the film that best represents their new approach, and the scale and tone of Hara 2, is Sennan Asbestos Disaster. This also follows the legal battles of a group of citizens, in this case poisoned by asbestos factories in their Osaka neighborhood. Kobayashi and Hara participated in their struggle for almost ten years, but the film’s purview reaches back to the industrialization of the country after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. The setting is Sennan, whose economy had come to revolve around the spinning of asbestos into fireproof fabric. Most families were involved in this work in one way or another, but no one was left untouched because of the dangerous nature of asbestos.

The film makes clear that the government long knew about the perils of these factories, but it looked the other way while protecting the factory owners. Waves of illnesses finally provoked the lawsuit that Hara and Kobayashi follow. After its swift historical overview, this lengthy film focuses on the victims. Hara introduces them one by one as the lawsuit moves through the courts at a most painful pace, and follows them as some pass away. From time to time, the action-film approach of Hara 1 appears, as we see him frustrated at the victims’ timidity, goading them on to act before the camera and in the face of the government’s cruel indifference to their suffering.

In this sense, the apparent divide between Hara 1 and Hara 2 ultimately resolves into a single, evolving practice—one that moves from the volatile singular body to the fragile, embattled collective without ever relinquishing the tensions that define either mode. The later films do not abandon the provocations of the earlier work; rather, they redistribute them across a wider social field, where individual bodies remain the irreducible sites through which history, violence, and responsibility are felt. What emerges is not a softening but an expansion: a cinema that insists on the inseparability of the personal and the political, the singular and the communal. If Hara’s films continue to unsettle, it is because they are driven by a restlessness that refuses resolution, a commitment to confrontation that is directed as much inward as outward. As he has reflected, “In my case, my sustenance is my own question mark about myself. There is the unknown within me that would lead me somewhere that I don’t know, and I’m perhaps afraid of that . . . Therefore, although I am shooting my subjects with my camera, I am also carrying the camera toward the inside of myself, and going further and deeper within.” It is this recursive movement—between others and the self, between action and reflection—that binds this body of work together, and that ensures its enduring urgency.

This month on the Criterion Channel, we’re celebrating a truly independent artist with a career-spanning retrospective dedicated to the always-provocative, fiercely creative Abel Ferrara. The classic series Neon Genesis Evangelion joins our anime offerings, while Girl Bands! collects high-energy tales of female rockers getting together to make noise. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including a conversation with Paul Dano on his craft, a trio of movies starring Madonna, exclusive premieres of Carla Simón’s Romería and Lucrecia Martel’s Our Land, the Oscar-winning animated odyssey Flow, the directorial debut from Academy Award nominee Wagner Moura, and a centennial celebration of Japanese New Wave legend Shohei Imamura.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

Directed by Abel Ferrara

Featuring a new introduction by critic Sean Fennessey, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

Pulsing with operatic intensity and a furious moral vision all his own, the films of Abel Ferrara comprise one of the most fearless and uncompromising bodies of work in modern cinema. Emerging in the New York of the seventies, he used the grime and sleaze of the city’s margins as a backdrop to subversive tales of sin and redemption, from the urban-nightmare thrillers Ms .45 and Bad Lieutenant to the delirious gangster saga King of New York and the provocative vampire allegory The Addiction. Whether working in science fiction (New Rose Hotel), horror (Body Snatchers), or inside-Hollywood melodrama (Dangerous Game), Ferrara has fused genre thrills with searing personal expression. And since relocating to Rome in his later career, he’s continued to direct searching meditations on art and life like Tommaso. Spanning nearly five decades of defiant independence, his films wrestle with profound themes of faith, power, guilt, and salvation, confronting the depths of human degradation in search of transcendent purity.

FEATURING: The Driller Killer (1979), Ms .45 (1981), Fear City (1984), China Girl (1987), King of New York (1990), Bad Lieutenant (1992), Body Snatchers (1993), Dangerous Game (1993), The Addiction (1995), The Blackout (1997), New Rose Hotel (1998), ’R Xmas (2001), Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009), 4:44 Last Day on Earth (2011),* Welcome to New York (2014),* The Projectionist (2019), Tommaso (2019), Padre Pio (2022),* Turn in the Wound (2024)

Neon Genesis Evangelion

The boundary-pushing franchise that propelled anime to new heights of psychological, moral, and philosophical complexity, Neon Genesis Evangelion remains a landmark of both adventurous visual storytelling and profound existential inquiry. Set in a postapocalyptic world where teenagers are recruited to pilot giant Multipurpose Humanoid Decisive Weapons—artificial humans known as Evangelions—to defend humanity from mysterious beings called Angels, the story evolves from high-stakes action spectacle into a deeply introspective exploration of identity, trauma, loneliness, and human connection. The original twenty-six-episode series is presented here in both its Japanese-language version and the Classic English dub—the latter of which is made available on streaming for the first time. Revised and expanded by its acclaimed companion films The End of Evangelion and Evangelion Death (True)², Neon Genesis Evangelion represents narrative and aesthetic world-building of the highest order.  

SERIES: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–1996)

FEATURES: Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997), Evangelion Death (True)² (1998)

Girl Bands!

Women come together to make noise in these electrifying tales of girl bands defying the establishment, chasing stardom, and making their voices heard. From ferocious anthems of punk rebellion like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains to wildly satirical takes on fame and the music industry like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Josie and the Pussycats to deeply felt stories of friendship and belonging like Linda Linda Linda and K-On! The Movie, this selection of cult favorites (Desperate Teenage Lovedolls) and pop fantasias (Grace of My Heart) celebrates the collective joy of women creating their own sounds, identities, and mythologies.

FEATURING: Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), Times Square (1980), Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains (1982), Streets of Fire (1984),* Desperate Teenage Lovedolls (1984), Lovedolls Superstar (1986), Grace of My Heart (1996),* Josie and the Pussycats (2001),* Prey for Rock & Roll (2003), Clean (2004),* Linda Linda Linda (2005), K-On! The Movie (2011)

Starring Madonna

More than a conventional actor, Madonna brings the full force of her own mythology—the raw magnetism, glamour, contradictions, and restless instinct for self-reinvention—to the characters she inhabits. In Desperately Seeking Susan, she updates the classic screwball heroine for the 1980s with effortless charisma and downtown New York cool; in Body of Evidence, she embodies the stylized excess of the erotic thriller; and in Dangerous Game, she draws on her real-life stardom to deliver one of her most vulnerable and unsettling performances, blurring the lines between identity, performance, and fame.

FEATURING: Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Body of Evidence (1993), Dangerous Game (1993)

The Craft of Acting: Paul Dano

A quietly electric screen presence whose ability to convey simmering internal tension has made him one of his generation’s most respected actors, Paul Dano has delivered unforgettable performances for a remarkable roster of major directors, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Steve McQueen, Denis Villeneuve, and Bong Joon Ho. In this edition of The Craft of Acting, Dano joins writer Isaac Butler to explore the art of bringing a character to life. Through discussing the formative influence that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s fearlessly vulnerable performance in Boogie Nights had on him, his process of channeling the creative spirit of Brian Wilson in the acclaimed biopic Love & Mercy, and how he harnessed the contrasting acting styles of Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal in his striking directorial debut,Wildlife, Dano offers insight into how he transforms rigorous preparation into riveting, in-the-moment screen alchemy.

FEATURING: Boogie Nights (1997), Love & Mercy (2015), Wildlife (2018)*

STREAMING PREMIERES

Romería

Featuring an introduction by director Carla Simón, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

An orphaned young woman’s search through the shards of her family’s past becomes an encounter with the missing pieces of her identity, in this graceful reflection on memory and inheritance. Marina (Llúcia Garcia), an aspiring filmmaker, visits the luminous seaside city of Vigo in Northwestern Spain seeking answers about her biological parents’ turbulent lives and mystery-shrouded deaths. As she gets to know her father’s fractious family, she confronts competing narratives and long-buried secrets. Unfolding with a free-flowing lyricism that tips into dream and fantasy, Romería finds director Carla Simón turning a compassionate gaze on her own complex heritage, reclaiming hidden history through the alchemical magic of cinema.

Our Land

With her first documentary feature, acclaimed director Lucrecia Martel (Zama, The Headless Woman) continues her career-long exploration of the injustices and colonial violence lurking beneath the veneer of Argentinean society. Combining urgent moral force and restless formal invention, Our Land illuminates the circumstances surrounding the murder of Javier Chocobar, an unarmed Indigenous activist who was shot while defending himself and his people from encroachment on their land. Connecting Chocobar’s killing to the centuries-old legacy of land and property theft across Latin America, Martel offers an at once intimate and sweeping account of Indigenous resilience in the face of ongoing erasure.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

A courageous cat embarks on a journey through a ruined world in this thrilling, Oscar-winning tale of friendship and survival that took indie animation to new heights of ambition and imagination.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Away (2019), director Gints Zilbalodis’s debut feature; audio commentary by Zilbalodis; interviews with Zilbalodis and cowriter-coproducer Matīss Kaža; and more.

James Caan is a professional thief struggling to break free from the criminal underworld in the stylishly moody, neon-spattered debut by action auteur Michael Mann.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Mann and Caan and interviews with Mann, Caan, and Johannes Schmoelling of the band Tangerine Dream, which contributed the film’s soundtrack.

Hey, hey, it’s the Monkees . . . being catapulted through one of American cinema’s most surreal sixties odysseys: a kaleidoscopic blend of media satire, concert movie, and antiwar cry. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by the Monkees, an interview with director Bob Rafelson, screen tests, and more.

Joan Micklin Silver digs fearlessly into the psychology of a toxic relationship in this thorny anti–romantic comedy about a man desperately trying to rekindle lost love.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A 1983 documentary about Micklin Silver; a program featuring producers Griffin Dunne, Mark Metcalf, and Amy Robinson; and more.

Satyajit Ray deconstructs the male buddy comedy in this subversive portrait of four friends whose urban prejudices and entitlements are exposed during a trip to the countryside.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An introduction by filmmaker Wes Anderson; a making-of program featuring interviews with Ray, actors Sharmila Tagore and Rabi Ghosh, and cinematographer Soumendu Roy; and more.

A severed ear leads a young man down a rabbit hole of depravity in David Lynch’s journey into the nightmare realm beneath the picturesque surfaces of small-town America.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: The Lost Footage, fifty-three minutes of deleted scenes and alternate takes assembled by Lynch; three documentaries on the making of the film; an interview with composer Angelo Badalamenti; and more.

With his father away battling wildfires, a boy watches his family unravel in the quietly revelatory directorial debut from Paul Dano. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Dano, screenwriter Zoe Kazan, actors Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal, cinematographer Diego García, production designer Akin McKenzie, and costume designer Amanda Ford; and more.

OUT-OF-PRINT EDITIONS

Collectors rejoice! Not every film the Criterion Collection has released over the last four decades remains in print. Formats change, licenses expire, and catalogues evolve. But here on the Channel, we’re thrilled to showcase some of the special editions we once released on LaserDisc, DVD, and Blu-ray, along with the supplements that accompanied them.

Cult icons Udo Kier and Joe Dallesandro star in Paul Morrissey’s reimagining of Mary Shelley’s myth, a riot of kinky transgression that fuses exploitation thrills with an ironic reflexivity. 

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Morrissey, Kier, and film historian Maurice Yacowar.

Udo Kier sinks his teeth into the role of the infamous Transylvanian count in underground auteur Paul Morrissey’s outrageously subversive, elegantly perverse reinvention of horror mythology.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Morrissey, Kier, and film historian Maurice Yacowar.

The otherworldly David Bowie is perfectly cast as an extraterrestrial posing as a human in Nicolas Roeg’s hallucinatory examination of alienation in contemporary life.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Roeg, Bowie, and actor Buck Henry; interviews with screenwriter Paul Mayersberg and actors Candy Clark and Rip Torn; and more.

Identities shift, blur, and dissolve in an existential ghost story, a shocking erotic fable, and a sci-fi nightmare by the visionary Japanese modernist.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Video essays on all three films by critic James Quandt, a documentary about the working relationship between Teshigahara and author Kobo Abe, and more.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

An Oversimplification of Her Beauty

Featuring an introduction by director Terence Nance, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

Terence Nance emerged as one of the most exciting and unique voices in American independent cinema with his audaciously original, dizzyingly inventive debut feature. With disarming vulnerability, formal daring, and a playful sense of humor, this one-of-a-kind confessional multimedia collage uses a kaleidoscopic mix of live action, animation, and unchained surrealism to trace the ever-shifting relationship between a sensitive young artist (Nance) and the elusive woman (Namik Minter) who becomes the catalyst for his journey of self-reflection.

Distant Journey

One of the first films to confront the horrors of the Holocaust remains one of the most powerful. Suffused with the visceral dread of a waking nightmare, Distant Journey draws from director and Holocaust survivor Alfréd Radok’s own experiences to tell the story of a Czechoslovak Jewish family—including a young doctor (Blanka Waleská) and her gentile husband (Otomar Krejča)—whose lives are torn apart by the terrors of the Nazi occupation, leading them inexorably to a grim fight for survival in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Blending expressionistic cinematography with archival documentary footage (some drawn from Triumph of the Will) to potent effect, this harrowing vision of human atrocity was banned in its home country for more than forty years, only to reemerge as urgent and impactful as ever. 

Nadja

Shot on a shimmering mix of black-and-white 35 mm and hallucinatory Pixelvision video, Michael Almereyda’s gothic mood piece follows New York–based vampire Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) as she reconnects with her twin brother Edgar (Jared Harris) following their father’s death, even as vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) pursues her from Manhattan to Transylvania. Executive produced by David Lynch, this Gen X cult favorite merges elements of the 1936 horror classic Dracula’s Daughter and André Breton’s surrealist novel Nadja for a singularly dreamy, sexy, deadpan reinvention of vampire mythology.

EPISODIC SERIES

Penance

An unsolved murder haunts the lives of four childhood friends in this eerie, intense five-part psychological thriller from master of ambient dread Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure, Cloud). On a small-town playground, a mysterious stranger approaches a group of young girls. When one is found murdered, the victim’s grief-stricken mother (Kyoko Koizumi) demands that the shaken survivors identify the killer or face a penance of her choosing. Growing up in the shadow of this tragic debt, each of the four girls cultivates a warped survival mechanism: avoidance, desperation, fear, and obsession. A disturbing, intricately constructed exploration of trauma, guilt, and memory from a female perspective, Penance blends Kurosawa’s trademark atmosphere of creeping unease with a quietly devastating commentary on Japanese gender expectations. 

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Directed by Susan Seidelman 

Featuring an introduction by Seidelman, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

In 1982, Susan Seidelman instantly established herself as one of the decade’s freshest cinematic voices when her debut feature, Smithereens, became the first American independent film to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. A vividly gritty time capsule of downtown New York’s postpunk underground, the film caught the attention of Hollywood and led to her bigger-budget follow-up, Desperately Seeking Susan, starring Madonna in a screwball romp through bohemian Manhattan. With subsequent gems like the clever sci-fi rom-com Making Mr. Right, Seidelman confirmed her flair for crafting offbeat comedies built around memorably messy, idiosyncratic women.

FEATURES: Smithereens (1982), Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Making Mr. Right (1987)

SHORTS: And You Act Like One Too (1976), Yours Truly, Andrea G. Stern (1979)

Directed by Carla Simón

One of contemporary cinema’s most perceptive chroniclers of fractured family bonds, Spanish director Carla Simón draws from her own complex history for this pair of empathetic, delicately observed portraits of girls growing up in the wake of profound loss. Infused with childhood memories, her luminous debut feature, Summer 1993, is a tender immersion into the world of a newly orphaned six-year-old girl navigating a tangle of confusion after she is sent to live with her aunt and uncle in the Catalan countryside. In the exquisite Romería, Simón once again revisits the unresolved questions of her own heritage, this time from the perspective of a teenager uncovering the long-buried secrets behind her parents’ lives and deaths.

FEATURING: Summer 1993 (2017), Romería (2025)

Directed by Shohei Imamura

Born one hundred years ago this month, Shohei Imamura left behind a body of work chronicling a Japan transformed by war, occupation, and rapid social change, yet still governed by the most primal of human instincts. Though he began his career as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu, Imamura forged an explosive cinema that stood in direct opposition to the classical master’s elegant restraint. Raw, earthy, sensual, and irreverent, Imamura’s films train an almost anthropological eye on the roiling underclass of Japanese society, revealing a world of criminals, outcasts, deviants, and subjugated women fighting to survive on the margins. From breakthrough works like Pigs and Battleships and The Insect Woman to late-career triumphs like the Palme d’Or winners The Ballad of Narayama and The Eel, Imamura’s films pulse with the anarchic, irrational force of the id.

FEATURING: Stolen Desire (1958), Endless Desire (1958), The Insect Woman (1963), Intentions of Murder (1964), The Pornographers (1966), Profound Desire of the Gods (1968), Vengeance Is Mine (1979), Eijanaika (1981), The Ballad of Narayama (1983), Zegen (1987), The Eel (1997)

Robert A. Nakamura: Godfather of Asian American Media

Heralded as “the Godfather of Asian American media,” Robert A. Nakamura was profoundly shaped by his childhood incarceration in a Japanese American internment camp during World War II, an experience that informed his lifelong exploration of identity, memory, and belonging through activist filmmaking. In landmark works like the intimate documentary Manzanar—one of the first films to confront Japanese internment from a personal perspective—the lyrical Wataridori: Birds of Passage, and the groundbreaking epic Hito Hata: Raise the Banner, Nakamura told stories long excluded from the American narrative, paving the way for the vibrant Asian American independent cinema movement that would flourish in the 1980s. His life and legacy are explored from an intimate vantage in Third Act, a moving documentary by his son Tadashi Nakamura, also presented here. 

FEATURES: Hito Hata: Raise the Banner (1980), Third Act (2025)

SHORTS: Manzanar (1972), Wataridori: Birds of Passage (1976)

SHORT FILMS

Short Films by Darol Olu Kae

The films of Darol Olu Kae assume a free-flowing, almost musical structure to tell richly textured stories of Black family, community, creativity, and inheritance, dissolving time to connect cultural memory to the living present. I Ran from It and Was Still in It interweaves archival fragments with home video to interrogate the personal experience of loss; Keeping Time plays like free-jazz improvisation as it portrays the interplay between multiple generations of musicians honoring and building on each other’s legacies; and Blur draws on family memories to tell a radiantly tender story of connection and caregiving amid the AIDS crisis.

FEATURING: I Ran from It and Was Still in It (2021), Keeping Time (2023), Blur (2025)

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

The Love Witch

Featuring an interview with Anna Biller, part of Criterion’s Under the Influence series

A lovelorn witch uses her powers to seduce men in this deliciously subversive brew of classic Technicolor gloss, retro-camp excess, and wicked humor.

INTERNATIONAL CLASSICS

Cemetery Man

A cemetery caretaker (Rupert Everett) contends with love and zombies in the ultimate erotic/romantic/existential cult-horror gorefest.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

The Little Sister*

A young woman navigates her lesbian identity and loyalty to her French Algerian family in this emotionally resonant portrait of queer awakening, winner of the Best Actress and Queer Palme prizes at the Cannes Film Festival.

Detention

Taiwanese national trauma takes on supernatural form in this gripping coming-of-age nightmare adapted from the hit horror video game.

Marighella

Directed by Wagner Moura—the Oscar-nominated star of The Secret Agent—this electrifying portrait of Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella combines riveting action with a galvanizing antiauthoritarian punch. 

MUSIC FILMS

Indie-rock royalty the Yeah Yeah Yeahs channel the spirit of David Lynch with this exquisitely ethereal, sublimely surreal record of a Los Angeles concert performance.

DOCUMENTARIES

Documentaries by Abel Ferrara

Abel Ferrara’s documentary filmmaking channels the same mix of raw immediacy and heightened expressionism that drives his narrative work. From the vanishing traces of New York City’s downtown culture (The Projectionist) to the gritty urban reality of Naples, Italy (Napoli, Napoli, Napoli), to the war-torn landscape of Ukraine in the aftermath of the Russian invasion (Turn in the Wound), his nonfiction films blur the lines between observation, drama, and performance to provocative, hypnotic effect.

FEATURING: Napoli, Napoli, Napoli (2009), The Projectionist (2019), Turn in the Wound (2024)

Los Sures

A vivid portrait of South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the early 1980s captures both the neighborhood’s challenges and the vibrancy of its Puerto Rican and Dominican community.

Being Frank: The Chris Sievey Story

Journey into the surreal, hilarious, and poignant world of Frank Sidebottom—the outsider comedy hero who became a cult icon in 1980s Britain—and the complicated man who created him.

New Wave

Mile-high hair. Synthesized music. Underground parties. Discover the untold story of the young Vietnamese American rebels who forged their own Southern California subculture.

Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars

Follow avant-garde theater legend Robert Wilson as he struggles to create one of the great unrealized stage productions of the twentieth century.

Uncle Howard

A nephew’s search for his filmmaker uncle’s archive becomes a poignant elegy for a vanished New York and a lost generation of gay artists.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Premiering September 1 in Rock Biopics That Don’t Suck: The Doors

Oliver Stone traces the brief, incendiary life of counterculture icon Jim Morrison with this hallucinatory look at his acid-fueled ascent and spectacular implosion.

Premiering September 1 in Southern Gothic: The Beguiled*

Sofia Coppola brings a female point of view to her hypnotic remake of a story about sexual tensions and rivalries run amok at a girls’ boarding school in the Civil War South.

In 1972, on the occasion of the Summer Games in Munich, the first-ever Olympic mascot made its debut. Waldi, a cheerful, bright-blue dachshund, was heavily merchandised, with over two million toys, keychains, T-shirts, and other memorabilia created in its image. Among these products were twenty-five thousand handcrafted Waldis made in the Philippines and brought to Munich by a not-yet-filmmaker named Eric de Guia, who had recently left his job as an analyst at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, and would soon rename himself Kidlat Tahimik (“quiet lightning” in Tagalog).

The Munich Games are remembered for a much darker incident, in which eleven members of the Israeli team were killed by a Palestinian militant group. The violence cast a pall over the Games and, for thirty-four hours, all competition was suspended. With no one in the mood to purchase Waldi souvenirs, a now-bankrupt Tahimik decamped to an artist commune outside the city. These events turned out to be pivotal for him, and they form the basis of his second feature, Turumba, a playful and unpredictable blend of fiction and documentary that follows a Filipino character who manufactures Waldi souvenirs for the Munich Olympic Games. 

At the commune, Tahimik met his wife, Katrin, and the couple had their first child, whom they named Kidlat. The future filmmaker also made the acquaintance of Werner Herzog, who cast him in a small part in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). Tahimik’s interest in film was piqued, and in 1977 he completed his first feature, Perfumed Nightmare, about a Filipino jeepney driver whose dream of becoming an astronaut in the West is dashed after a dispiriting visit to Europe and America. This debut—which was championed by the likes of Susan Sontag and Fredric Jameson, and is now considered a foundational work of Third Cinema—established the director’s reputation as a sharply critical and scrappy auteur of postcolonial film.

Turumba began as a segment in a six-part omnibus commissioned for television by a Christian production company. With each episode helmed by a director from a different continent, the show revolved around the theme of the Apostles’ Creed. Tahimik chose to focus on the phrase “our daily bread” as his inspiration, and the result was Olympic Gold, a forty-five-minute short that he would later expand into the feature-length Turumba. Like all of Tahimik’s films, videos, and performances, both iterations of this project draw on autobiographical elements and add whimsical flourishes. Young Kadu (Homer Abiad, Tahimik’s nephew) watches as his father, Romy (Iñigo Vito), leads the residents of Pakil—the village where Tahimik’s father grew up—in the religious ceremony of the Turumba, a procession of a centuries-old Catholic icon. In preparation for the festival, the family also makes colorful papier-mâché dolls and animals that they sell in town. Throughout the film, the frequently handheld camera is like an eager participant in the proceedings, attentive to the elaborate beadwork on the dress worn by the village idol, the deep green of the jungle, and a small child asleep in the lap of a clarinet player during rehearsal.

While Kadu and his siblings work in the yard outside their hut, their grandmother tells incredible stories. “Did I tell you I was once a princess?” one of her tales begins. The family arranges their creations on the steps of the church, catching the eye of a German businesswoman (Katrin de Guia, Tahimik’s wife), who commissions twenty-five thousand papier-mâché Waldis for the Munich Olympics. Romy enlists the village children in around-the-clock production. Kadu suddenly becomes so busy that he no longer has time to visit Pati (Patricio Abari), who is something of a father figure to the protagonist and works as a blacksmith making machetes from discarded foreign automobiles. Romy, meanwhile, neglects his duties as kantore, the conductor of the musical procession, and fantasizes about buying a BMW. When the German woman requests his presence abroad, he eagerly complies. Along with the completed Waldi order, he brings Kadu to Munich, though it means that they will miss the Turumba.

The film stands out in Tahimik’s oeuvre as the only production for which he has used a script (one was required for the commission). And though the full-length version is one of his rarest works, the original short is one of his most widely viewed, having aired on German public television—to a prime-time audience, no less. The eighty-eight-minute feature incorporates everything from the earlier film, except a playful introduction that Tahimik added for its broadcast. In that excised section, he explains how he came to use “our daily bread” as his theme, as a reference to both the Catholic community depicted in the film and the hustle required for it to survive. Cheekily, he unveils a microphone made of bamboo and offers it for sale.

Tahimik’s wide grin in this unorthodox segment conceals his slyness behind the camera. On its surface, Turumba is a parable about the temptations of Western wealth. Certainly, the German woman’s manufacture order results in exploitation, familial strife, and the decline of village traditions. But the film and the context surrounding it are more complex than these problems would suggest. If Turumba was meant to be a warning, the message came too late, because the forces of global commerce had already reached neighboring Balian, where Perfumed Nightmare is set. There, villagers were already producing handicrafts to be shipped for Western export from Manila, only a hundred kilometers away. Then there is the question of the film’s audience. Olympic Gold was first seen by the German public in 1981, and Turumba was released in New York in 1984. Meanwhile, screenings in the Philippines were infrequent and sporadic, despite the film’s cautionary tale being ostensibly aimed at a Pinoy audience.

Tahimik fills the frame with lush detail: music from the Turumba revelers, children strumming guitars, brisk winds rustling the palms. The image of the village is bucolic and isolated, save a few key references to the outside world that Tahimik slips in. In one scene, as a few men play checkers with recycled bottle caps, a radio broadcast situates the film in 1971, during the global energy crisis. In another, Kadu brings Pati to a graveyard of Japanese war trucks—“top-quality steel,” Pati says approvingly—to source material for his machetes. Like the army vehicles repurposed into jeepneys in Perfumed Nightmare, these are remnants of imperial conquest fought on and over Philippine soil, from centuries of Spanish colonial rule to the fifty years of American empire, including the United States’ Pacific theater during the Second World War. Even after the Philippines gained independence in 1946, its people faced repression from within. On September 21, 1972, a couple of weeks after the massacre in Munich, Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law, beginning a notoriously brutal dictatorship that lasted for the next fourteen years. Turumba leads up to the precipice of these events, but instead of showing them unfolding, it depicts a literal typhoon descending on the village. This is not merely symbolism—in Tahimik’s films, nature has world-historical implications. “Do you know Americans tried to steer typhoons against the Vietnamese?” Kadu asks in voice-over, with a wisdom far beyond a child of his age.

Tahimik’s own story is inseparable from that of his country. He grew up in a well-to-do family in Baguio, where success was measured financially and often by the ability to go abroad (he received his MBA from the Wharton School of Business). Heavily influenced by American culture, he was still a child when the U.S. policy of “benevolent assimilation” in the Philippines officially ended, and while working in Europe he saw firsthand the neocolonial system built around the balikbayan, or Filipino guest worker—a trained individual, often in a service field like nursing and housekeeping, who works in more affluent countries and sends their earnings back home. While making Turumba, Tahimik was already conceptualizing what would become one of his largest projects: the incomplete Memories of Overdevelopment and its 2015 follow-up, Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III (there is apparently no second installment in the series). In a nod to the Third Cinema landmark Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), by the Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, these films explore the story of Enrique de Malacca, a Tagalog-speaking slave whom Ferdinand Magellan purchased as an interpreter, and who accomplished the circumnavigation of the globe that Magellan himself failed to complete. In Tahimik’s speculative telling, Malacca is the original balikbayan, as well as the first person to experience the world in its entirety.

While some have justifiably criticized the tendency to reduce Tahimik to an avatar of Third World cinema, the mental maps drawn by his films are undeniably expansive; Jameson noted that Tahimik’s work “independently [seems] to have conceived of the vocation of art itself as that of inventing new geotopical cartographies.” Even their margins brim with adjacent places and histories, like concentric circles that radiate out from a drop of water that falls into a puddle. Meanwhile, Tahimik’s characters, wide-eyed travelers all, easily traverse bridges and oceans, and even—in Who Invented the Yoyo? Who Invented the Moon Buggy? (1978/1982)—the expanse of outer space that leads to the moon. To some extent, this kind of global awareness is the burden of the colonial or postcolonial subject. But Tahimik fashions this in his own delightfully off-kilter way. It would be wrong to cast him as antimodern: Tahimik has an ongoing fascination with aeronautic technology, and in Turumba, there’s plenty of laughter on the Waldi production line. When Romy has earned enough to bring electricity into the home, he also buys speakers to blast the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Kadu and his siblings dance to the music in the yard, and their grandmother even taps along on her knee. Just don’t forget the old songs, she says, smiling.

In Turumba, Kadu and his friends tear up a poster advertising a cigarette company. They take the paper scraps home, where they dip them in glue and add them to their papier-mâché creations. The action recalls a decisive moment in Tahimik’s own life, when he ripped up his Wharton diploma to sever his ties to that part of his life. (The gesture was primarily symbolic; acknowledging his parents’ well-intentioned wishes for him, he had the school send a duplicate copy of the diploma to them.) Paper doesn’t last long in a Tahimik film, at least not before it’s turned to another, better use. Maybe this is why he never bothered with another script, which to him would have amounted to another useless stack of papers. Back when he was preparing to make Memories of Overdevelopment, Tahimik had appealed to Francis Ford Coppola for assistance. (Though Coppola had shot the jungle scenes for Apocalypse Now ten kilometers from the site of Perfumed Nightmare, the two directors did not meet until 1979, at the Cannes Film Festival. Coppola later distributed Perfumed Nightmare.) Funding was ultimately approved, but by some accident the letter of confirmation never reached Tahimik. He now considers the mishap a saving grace: “I don’t know what it would look like. They could have controlled me a little bit or forced me to put things on paper. [Such funding] limits these cosmic options because you get stuck once it has been written on paper. It would have become a more conventional film.”

But it was well before all that, nine years before directing his first feature film, that Tavernier discovered Jim Thompson’s novel Pop. 1280 and knew he wanted to adapt it for the screen. In the intervening decade, he worked as a film critic, as a publicist and press agent (for Jean-Luc Godard and John Ford, among others), and briefly as assistant director for Jean-Pierre Melville. With those experiences, plus several shorts and six acclaimed features, under his belt, he finally returned to Thompson’s novel. Coup de torchon (Clean Slate) was released in 1981.

In his native United States, Thompson was long considered a pulp novelist, whereas in France, he has been appreciated for his dark vision and his modernist aesthetic. Published in 1964, during the civil rights movement, Pop. 1280 paints a merciless portrait of petty bickering and casual racism in a Texas town. Like other Thompson protagonists, Pop. 1280’s Nick Corey carries a hidden “sickness” that manifests itself in violence. Thompson’s feral antiheroes remain compelling because their individual slide into perdition, seen from the inside, is understood as a collective and social, even a cosmic, fate. They are trapped inside their lucidity, helpless to change the course of history. Stanley Kubrick, for whose Paths of Glory (1957) Thompson cowrote the screenplay, said of another Thompson novel, The Killer Inside Me, that it was “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered,” a remark that describes Pop. 1280 just as well. Tavernier was drawn to the challenge of filming a novel that both Thompson and filmmaker Alain Corneau had declared, after their failed joint attempt, impossible to adapt.

Matching Thompson’s sardonic wit while bringing significant modifications, Tavernier made the story thoroughly French and uniquely his own. Most notably, he moved the action to French West Africa in July 1938, on the eve of the Munich Agreement and the Second World War. Shot in Senegal, the film begins in the imaginary backwater of Bourkassa-Ourbangui, where Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) plays at being a colonial sheriff. He knows he was appointed to the post because he can be counted on not to make waves or actually enforce the law. Between naps, he spends his days appeasing bullies and pimps and turning a blind eye to widespread ineptitude, corruption, and brutality. He plays childish pranks on his shrewish wife, Huguette (Stéphane Audran), and her moronic lover (Eddy Mitchell), whom she passes off as her brother. Lucien stands by while his mistress, Rose (Isabelle Huppert), is beaten by her husband and then hurries to comfort her afterward. Weary of being disregarded and humiliated, he finally takes it upon himself to purge the town of its miscreants, folding his personal vendettas into the mix. The plot, such as it is, consists of Lucien’s growing anguish about the inhumanity around him. His attempted remedies are of the same stuff as the problem itself, however, and he gradually capitulates to the overwhelming forces of evil in which he is rapidly submerging.

Coup de torchon marks the completion of a trajectory that includes four of the filmmaker’s earliest films, beginning with his first feature, The Clockmaker of St. Paul (1974). Adapted from a novel by Georges Simenon, that film focused on a father whose son has committed a crime. The protagonist of Let Joy Reign Supreme (1975) is Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, regent during the minority of King Louis XV. The regent sees forewarnings of the coming revolution but is powerless to prevent it. The film incorporates episodes from memoirs by the regent’s friend, the Duc de Saint-Simon, and music composed by the regent himself. The Judge and the Assassin (1976) pits a serial killer against a judge obsessed with tracking him down, less to serve justice than his own ambitions. The historical criminal who inspired the film had been chronicled by none other than Tavernier’s father.

These four films have many commonalities, some more obvious than others. All four are adaptations. All are character-driven, with casts headed by the magisterial Noiret. These films of the 1970s, created in the aftermath of the 1968 revolts, foreground figures who lose faith in the established order—the law, the monarchy, and, in Coup de torchon, France’s colonial (mis)adventure—and struggle alone to negotiate their roles as men, as citizens, before God, and in history. The assassin calls himself “God’s anarchist,” and other characters (including Lucien Cordier) could say the same. Made in 1980 and released in 1981, Coup de torchon signals the end of the post-1968 era, just as the 1981 election of François Mitterrand to the presidency marked a turning point following the Gaullist years.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, all four films struggle to achieve resolution. The Clockmaker of St. Paul ends on a pensive, inconclusive note, with the father and his activist friend contemplating an unknown future. The other three leave narrative behind and freeze into symbolic tableaux that raise the stakes into an allegorical realm. Of the four, the ending of Coup de torchon is the most successful, perhaps in part because the whole film is about endings.

An early version of the script closed on a blend of science fiction and burlesque. At a village ball, while Lucien and the newly arrived schoolteacher, Anne, revolve in a slow dance, they and the other dancers disappear and are replaced by gorillas. As they dance, one of the gorillas asks where all the humans have gone. A second gorilla responds, “They’re all dead.” “Shit!” replies the first gorilla. “We’ll have to start over.” This conclusion literally takes the whole human enterprise back to the beginning, wiping everything away to start again with a “clean slate.”

Tavernier wisely set aside that draft. Instead, he bookended the film with two takes of a scene that is equally disconnected from the narrative. The opening sequence shows a desert landscape, where Lucien watches emaciated children digging in the sand for grubs to eat. A solar eclipse darkens the horizon, and the children begin to shiver. Lucien comes forward to build a small fire to warm them. We might be at the dawn of civilization. Lucien seems both protective and paternalistic, at once Prometheus, Christ, and the original colonizer, bringing warmth and enlightenment into a scene of poverty and darkness. The scene is mute except for Philippe Sarde’s otherworldly and discordant score, part jazz, part space music, thoroughly alarming and disorienting. The ending sequence returns abruptly to the same locale. Lucien squats under a baobab tree, an anguished expression on his face. He fingers his pistol, which he aims alternately at the children and at himself. Although this ending is continuous with the film’s beginning, now, after much mayhem, the scene is inflected differently. Lucien has failed to cast out darkness and hunger, and he has redefined his job as putting people out of their misery. No longer Prometheus bringing enlightenment, he has turned into the ultimate antihero: Lucifer, bearer of light, in the form of a firearm. After the first (the opening) version of the scene, Lucien stumbles back toward town, chased by a swaying Steadicam, as we hear the film’s first line: “I thought it was the end of the world.” That lament will recur twice more, suggesting the eclipse of a way of life.

Between these sequences, we witness the slow erosion of a character and a society. We initially sympathize with Lucien and wonder how he tolerates the degradations and humiliations visited on him by village lowlifes and even Marcel (Guy Marchand), his police counterpart in a larger nearby town. But we gradually come to understand that Lucien’s thickheaded-oaf persona is a facade, and that he is smarter than he lets on. He punishes his tormentors by manipulating them, laying clever traps that set them up to wipe one another out, while he looks on, feigning resigned impotence.

Contributing to the film’s moral and aesthetic complexity—and perhaps also to the viewer’s occasional disorientation—is that it never settles into a stable, recognizable genre. Is it tragedy or melodrama? Dystopia or slapstick? The answer is: all of the above. As its eclipse theme suggests, Coup de torchon clearly offers an apocalyptic vision: institutions have abdicated their moral authority, and divine intervention is no longer expected. All that remains is laughter. At the same time, there are bittersweet film-noir moments: Lucien and Rose’s farewell, for instance, underlined by Rose’s trench coat, evokes Casablanca and Jean Gabin classics like Pépé le moko.

The most sustained genre at play is Tavernier’s favorite, the western, with its tales of expansion and nation-building. The official rationale for Horace Greeley’s famous injunction to “go west, young man” was America’s manifest destiny to spread civilization into the wilderness. From there, it’s only a short step to the French mission civilisatrice that rationalized colonial conquest. Tavernier adapts recognizable tricks of the genre. As in Victor Fleming’s The Virginian, for example, a schoolteacher’s arrival in Wyoming from Vermont activates recognizable binaries that animate the western: America’s East Coast/western “frontier” divide is easily transposed to the French metropole/colonial settlement. Civilized institutions and prim manners are associated with femininity, while disregard for the law and disheveled cowboy masculinity align with the outpost. And so on. The western is a subgenre of melodrama, too, where social dramas lurk behind intimate ones, and Coup de torchon fully exploits this capacity for allegory.

Forever a Lyonnais at heart, Tavernier once declared that “a film is like a meal.” Much of the pleasure of his films stems from the creative team of colleagues he gathered around his table like a family, welcoming input from everyone on both sides of the camera. Tavernier was a voracious reader, a habitué of the theater, and enormously knowledgeable about music, particularly jazz. All of these passions provided sources of inspiration and informed his choices of collaborators.

Already, for his first feature, he was able to enlist Noiret, who even helped finance the project. A cinematic legend, Noiret would consider his numerous performances for Tavernier to be the highlight of his career. Coup de torchon attracted several other Tavernier veterans, notably Isabelle Huppert as Rose and Jean-Pierre Marielle as a pimp and his twin. To this team of old friends, Tavernier added some stellar discoveries. Eddy Mitchell, a contemporary of the more famous rocker Johnny Hallyday, had contributed songs to Tavernier’s A Week’s Vacation (1980); in Coup de torchon, he plays the farcical and disturbing Nono. Behind the camera, too, Tavernier enlisted his familiar team—cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, editor Armand Psenny, costume designer Jacqueline Moreau, composer Philippe Sarde—along with some inspired newcomers. He successfully recruited celebrated production designer Alexandre Trauner, who had lived in Africa, and who had designed films for such luminaries as Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, and Marcel Carné. Trauner would later create the moody, blue-toned sets for ’Round Midnight (1986), Tavernier’s tribute to jazz.

And let’s not forget the screenplay. Tavernier’s first feature had provoked a major kerfuffle because he chose the screenwriting team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, thereby giving the impression of casting his lot with the “cinema of quality” that preceded the nouvelle vague. Nevertheless, he cowrote two of his early features with the pair and then, after Bost died in 1975, he scripted Coup de torchon with Aurenche alone. Tavernier would go on to adapt a novel by Bost for the immensely successful A Sunday in the Country (1984); Safe Conduct, his 2002 drama about the cinema industry during the occupation, is based in part on memoirs by Aurenche.

Aurenche and Bost had been in the business for decades and had signed numerous titles, such as René Clément’s Forbidden Games (1952) and Gervaise (1956), that are now considered masterpieces. But the pair became associated with a postwar cultural policy designed to raise the profile of French national cinema in order to counterbalance the influx of American films (implicitly a “cinema of quantity”) that was a condition of the Marshall Plan. Many of the “quality” films were indeed uninspired adaptations of French literary classics, in a style rejected by the Young Turks of the New Wave. “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” François Truffaut’s misguided 1954 manifesto in Cahiers du cinéma, served as a rallying cry, and “Aurenchébost” were effectively blacklisted by leading filmmakers and producers for almost two decades. Tavernier chose to bring them back for their masterly dialogue. He especially appreciated their wacky humor in Claude Autant-Lara’s postwar occupation comedy, La traversée de Paris (1956), and the covert Resistance themes in the apparently anodyne Douce (1943), also directed by Autant-Lara. Tavernier also relished their company and needed the perspective of an older generation for his father-son story in The Clockmaker of St. Paul.

Thanks in large part to its script cowritten with Aurenche, Coup de torchon is difficult to classify into a genre or trend or movement or style. What can be said is that, like all Tavernier’s films, this one is deeply engaged in social issues while remaining playfully experimental, mixing moods and tones from anger through hope, disillusionment, even hilarity. So instead of pinning it down, we might instead conclude quite simply that it’s a masterpiece.

The Sudanese Film Group was formed in 1989 with the mission of promoting cinema culture, with an emphasis on boosting both exhibition and production. Four years earlier, a popular uprising ended the sixteen-year dictatorship of Jaafar Nimeiri. Suddenly, hope filled the hearts of the Sudanese people, and democracy and a more equal society seemed possible. With the dream of an artistic renaissance now an achievable goal, Ibrahim Shaddad, Eltayeb Mahdi, and Suliman Mohamed Ibrahim Elnour—founding members of the Sudanese Film Group—sought freedom of expression and wanted to continue the grassroots movement that had taken down the corrupt oligarchy. They had gotten to know one another during their years of working within the Sudanese government’s Ministry of Culture, and had even collaborated on publishing a film journal.

Shaddad, Mahdi, and Elnour had all studied film in Eastern Europe in the seventies and were influenced by leftist ideals. They took inspiration from these experiences abroad, and from the Pan-African and Pan-Arab radical movements taking shape at the time. Their optimism was cut short, though, by a military coup d’état just a few months after they had formed their group. For the next thirty years, Sudan would be ruled by authoritarian military men and their Islamist technocrat partners. The coup’s leader, Omar al-Bashir, would completely change the fabric of the country, leaving no space for cultural enrichment. The Sudanese Film Group was targeted, and Shaddad was arrested and interrogated for pushing a foreign and antigovernment agenda.

The films that the trio made before they established the SFG give a sense of their shared goals. These works draw on symbolism, folklore, and local traditions to tell radical, forward-looking, and distinctly Sudanese stories that range from the historical to the observational to the expressionistic. Among the highlights is Shaddad’s The Rope (1984), which starts with a shocking image of a crying infant being covered in a white cloth and then punched to death. What follows is an exploration of a 1822 massacre that thwarted the Sudanese people’s attempts to revolt against their colonizers, a traumatic event allegorized through the story of two blind men leading a donkey (or is it leading them?) across the Sahara Desert. Shaddad repeatedly cuts to an image of a fez, the traditional hat worn by the elite Turkish classes, signifying a foreign colonial presence. Foreboding music merges with the sound of the haboob (the Sudanese Arabic word for the big, gusty winds characteristic of the region), while vultures circle overhead, thickening the atmosphere with unease. Taken together, these elements turn the film into a sustained meditation on history and the burdens that persist long after the violence is over. Nothing much happens, because nothing much changes. This use of repetition and stasis can be found in an earlier film by Shaddad, the 1981 documentary A Camel, which depicts the titular animal turning a sesame mill in a never-ending circle of forced labor. The only sound we hear is the camel’s moaning, an abstracted representation of painful and devalued servitude.

Like The Rope, Eltayeb Mahdi’s The Tomb (1978) is a fictional film that engages with real-life events. Sudanese folklore provides the framework for examining the nature of authority and how people create belief systems to avoid confronting an intolerable reality. The protagonist is the keeper of a holy man’s tomb who purports to be a conduit between God and the human realm. Claiming to be able to cure ailments and make dreams come true, he is transparently exploiting his fellow villagers—but are they really so gullible, or do they just need an alternative vision of life to escape into? Faith in spirits and the afterlife is an integral part of Sudanese society, and Mahdi takes a subtle approach to confronting these beliefs, using sparse dialogue and symbolic images that allow audiences to draw their own conclusions.

Mahdi’s equally compelling The Station (1989) focuses on the slow rhythms of everyday life at a traditional resting place (al mahatta), a space defined by stillness and waiting. In this microcosm of Sudanese society, people gather, lounge, and do very little in a narrative sense. Their state of repose—a metaphor for the nation’s endurance—is disrupted by a sudden intrusive alarm, the sound of distant geopolitical violence penetrating this enclosed society. Subtle signs of colonial influence also appear on the trucks that bring goods into the station. The film evokes the quiet persistence of life in a communal space beset by global pressures.

Unlike these works by Shaddad and Mahdi, Africa, the Jungle, Drums and Revolution (1979) is rooted in an outsider’s perspective. Elnour’s graduation thesis film, made while he was studying at the VGIK school in Moscow, juxtaposes archival footage of African heroes and traditional dancing with man-on-the-street interviews with Russian citizens sharing their preconceived notions about Africa. Some of the people whom Elnour engages are well-meaning, with generally positive and inclusive attitudes. But the film reveals a jaundiced and exoticized view of the continent, influenced by colonial depictions that have long permeated the Global North. By documenting such casual ignorance and racism, Elnour’s film anticipates the contemporary discourse around how the racialized gaze can shape our understanding of entire cultures.

As these works demonstrate, the members of the Sudanese Film Group did not make films for mass consumption, as did many of the filmmakers in neighboring Egypt, which had a thriving and commercial movie industry at the time. In contrast, the SFG eschewed the influence of Hollywood and pushed for social change. Using a patient sense of pacing and innovative editing techniques, as well as a storytelling style that made minimal use of dialogue and character psychology, they challenged audiences and took a bold stance in favor of artistic expression.

Though the group’s work was interrupted by political upheaval, the men have continued to advocate for cinema’s place in their local culture. Documentarian Suhaib Gasmelbari’s Talking About Trees (2019) catches up with the SFG in middle age. In the film, Shaddad, Mahdi, and Elnour are still friends, and are attempting to revive a dilapidated theater in Khartoum, an effort that requires them to communicate with the authoritarian government. Despite the hurdles they encounter, the tone of the film is playful and optimistic. Its best moments show the trio reminiscing about the projects they haven’t had the chance to make. And while there is heartache in their voices as they recall the arrests and interrogations they experienced under Bashir’s rule, their passion is evident and undiminished.

Gasmelbari’s film, which played at many festivals around the world, has bolstered the SFG’s legacy and led to a revival of their work. Over the past several years, the aesthetic language these pioneers developed has been adopted by a new generation of filmmakers who are carrying the torch for Sudanese cinema into the present. Shaddad’s indelible images of a camel circling around in futility are referenced in 2025’s Khartoum, a documentary directed by a collective of Sudanese filmmakers consisting of Rawia Alhag, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, Anas Saeed, and Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad. A chronicle of the fall of Bashir’s dictatorship, the film also explores the aftermath of the revolution, which gave rise to another military coup and the 2023 war that continues to batter the people of Sudan.

At a time when the country is once again engulfed in turmoil, looking back on the films of the SFG is all the more inspiring. The fact that Shaddad, Mahdi, and Elnour were able to accomplish what they did years ago remains a source of hope for young directors today, like the makers of Khartoum, as well as Suzanna Mirghani, whose feature debut, Cotton Queen, premiered at the Venice International Film Festival last year. These artists are contending with new challenges, including war and displacement, but like their predecessors, they continue to overcome extraordinary odds to bring their visions to life.

Hi, Mike—maybe we start with Deformer, since it feels like an origin point for you as a filmmaker.

It’s one of the first things I ever did, in 1996. I was hanging out a lot at the Alleged Gallery in New York City, run by Aaron Rose, which showed a lot of artists from the skateboarding universe. I was reuniting with skate culture after art school at Cooper Union; it was a freeing time, getting out from under art-school anxieties and theory-driven art practice, and reconnecting with the pleasure of making things and the subversive punk excitement of pre-art-school me. That’s where I met Spike Jonze, Lance Acord—both helped me find a way into filmmaking. And that’s where I met Ed Templeton, a legendary pro skater who was becoming a very interesting artist.

Ed had this very Orange County childhood, and he got inspiration by being a contradiction to the sunny emotional, cultural, political flatness of that world —sort of an Egon Schiele of Huntington Beach. The title Deformer is from his work: the skating culture and community; his relationship with his wife, Deanna; and making art opened a more honest and bigger world where he could acknowledge the pain and traumas of his childhood and be decidedly “deformed” inside the falsely “normal” community where he grew up. I could relate to that, coming from Santa Barbara, and feeling outside of the happiness this beautiful place said it provided.

I wanted to make a portrait of Ed and Huntington Beach, and how they cocreated each other. This sort of cultural/environmental portrait became a central way of making films for me. It has so many moves that I keep coming back to: Objects and places are presented as just as important as people, and it’s happily digressive. I would leave the audio equipment with Ed at night, and he and his friends would record stories, jokes, and passages from his journals—this idea reappears in the way I use other people’s texts in my features. Tonally, it’s kind of funny, enjoying the absurdities of this place, but there’s also a more serious meditation on culture. Finally, the film is composed of portraits—people looking into the camera, like evidence or anthropological fragments. In a lot of ways, the influence of Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces is there, and William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest—the idea of a radical democracy of images, elevating the seemingly unimportant. Walker Evans and Wolfgang Tillmans were big influences too. Like Shore’s and Eggleston’s, their books of photos were open-ended stories. I was also very interested in the short films of Charles and Ray Eames—direct, educational films, very simple. Deformer is the weird combination of those influences.

That sensibility definitely carries over into The Architecture of Reassurance (2000). You’ve said you borrowed the title from a Disneyland exhibition. Why did that phrase feel like the right frame for the film?

It perfectly described the false promise and actual feeling the suburbs gave me. In Santa Barbara, we lived in this old 1915 Spanish-colonial house that my mom constantly fixed up. I would walk to my elementary school by veering into new seventies suburban developments that felt aligned with the world I saw on TV: there was an aesthetic agreement between the homes, and life seemed not as murky as it was at my house, with the secrets of my family and its depression, so I loved them. While I lived in a much more “artistic” and unique home, filled with history and great taste, I yearned for that banal world. Feeling like an impostor, I would walk through those neighborhoods and make up reasons as to why I was there, and from those memories I extrapolated the plot of The Architecture of Reassurance.

I’m also working out an interest in combining documentary and fiction. The couple who are interviewed in The Architecture of Reassurance are the actual owners of the house that we filmed in; I also asked the young actress to come up with lies about why she’s there on the spot, and this helped give her performance energy. I feel more “honest” when I can include things past the edges of my fictional stories. It’s not until I find a way to include some interruption outside of the frame — something alien to the stories and my authorship — that I feel like I have enough of a world to finish the script. Looking back, while I feel very much a writer-director, even then I wasn’t married to the words so much as the feeling I was hoping to capture.

Did you have a desire to be a narrative feature filmmaker?

I didn’t study film in art school. I was basically on my way to being a fine artist. I loved Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Hans-Peter Feldmann, and projects like Group Material, but me and some friends wanted out of the rarefied art world — we wanted something more “public.” For me, that began with graphic design: I worked for a bit at M&Co, learning from amazing designers and artists who worked there, like Marlene McCarty. It wasn’t until I was twenty-seven that I had the idea of directing. Watching The Thin Blue Line — a strange mishmash of documentary and dramatization — was the first film experience that made me think, I could do that.

At the time, I didn’t know what a writer-director was, but I wanted to make work that was mine top to bottom. At first, I thought I might be like the Eameses and make innovative educational films, or be a direct documentarian like the Maysles brothers, or D. A. Pennebaker, continuing the social engagement I had gotten from being a student of Hans Haacke. “Hollywood” filmmaking was a different planet, and American indie cinema also felt pretty foreign to me — the whole world of narrative and emotional verisimilitude was not something I connected with. At the same time, a film like 8½, because it was so adventurous and strange, not traditionally narrative, felt easier to understand. It was more like the art world I was from.

The Architecture of Reassurance screened at Sundance — did that open the door to making your first feature, Thumbsucker (2005)?

[Laughs.] Nothing helped me land Thumbsucker! That was a tough six-year journey. I got to show The Architecture of Reassurance at Sundance, which was a big deal, and I got an agent from it, though it didn’t help me much. In my experience of the film world, each time you want to step up, you have to be willing to start over from the beginning. I moved from being a graphic designer/artist to being a director by begging to do videos for anyone I was doing album covers for. After a few years of making music videos — I did about ten, including the ones I did for Air — then the powers that be think you can do music videos, but that doesn’t mean you can do ads. You have to start from zero again. I did spec jobs — any creatively bad job I could. And I would put all my video fees back into projects of my own because I was treating it as a way to build a reel. Then, after years of building up a “reputation” in those worlds, and building confidence from directing a lot of very different situations, shooting all around the world, with the weird dynamics of filming celebrity athletes, big budgets, big ideas that are not easy to direct — it does help you break into the feature world, but then you have to start from zero again. That’s my experience—an American style of learning filmmaking under capitalism. I basically got that model from watching Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry do it ahead of me.

Music videos, and even ads, and the shorts I paid for, these were all my film school. More than steps on the ladder of this weird career, they are where I figured out not just how to direct but how to communicate with people, and because they are shorter, or driven by the magical force of music, they’re inherently more experimental. I’m very grateful I got to learn in that more permissive and expressive space.

Let’s talk about your music videos—we’re including two in this box set. You made several before “All I Need,” but that one feels like a turning point. What opened up for you on this project?

“All I Need” was part of a long, unusual, and productive collaboration with Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, who are the French band Air. From the beginning, the idea was that I would do all the graphics and the videos for their Moon Safari album and its singles, and that was something I had wanted to do for a long time: build a whole world of integrated design and filmmaking. By the time we made “All I Need,” I’d already done two other music videos for them: “Sexy Boy” was a dreamy, puppet-y video, and “Kelly Watch the Stars” a surrealist Ping-Pong experience. At the time, the radical differences in the Fischli and Weiss work were my favorite thing, and I wanted each piece to be very different from the last. Nico and JB supported that. “All I Need” is kind of a sentimental song, even to the band themselves—not schmaltzy, but I remember Nico and JB saying something like, “It’s too pretty, fuck it up.” And that’s a wonderful prompt.

I saw myself as a documentary-based person, and I was coming from a conceptual-art-world habit of appropriating cultural forms for other means, and I had the idea of doing a miniature documentary as a music video. As this was their most romantic, sentimental song, I wanted to engage with that tone by pushing against its dreaminess. I pitched doing a documentary of an actual couple who are in love: I wanted to interview them and have their answers play as VO over the music. The Air guys, being who they are, said, “Great.”

You’ve told me it was where you learned how to be a director, and that you’re not sure what would have happened if you hadn’t made it.

So, what I pitched was a kind of conceptual-art trick, but what I got out of the shoot was something emotional and connective and other than cerebral. I accidentally bumped into the sincerity and emotional availability that those kids had—I didn’t know that was going to happen. But I did grow up in the next town, I was a skater like them, and we hit it off. Perhaps it was the first time I really understood the power of a director who’s emotionally available and connected to his subjects. I am a formerly very shy person—way too self-conscious and afraid to be a good performer—and I feel for anyone who gets in front of the camera for me. Because these kids were very much like me, and not actors, it all came together where the trust between me and them allowed for and created an intimacy that’s in the video.

It had an immediate, not-afraid-to-be-vulnerable, not-interested-in-being-cool energy, communicated very simply. I hadn’t experienced that before, as a director, where people reacted emotionally to something I had made. And it was the beginning of a mysterious practice of creating a space for some kind of emotional realness between me and whoever’s in front of the camera, me and the crew, and, via the camera and editing, a communication/connection between me and the audience.

Godard was another huge influence on me—his shelf at Kim’s Video on Avenue A seemed like the heaviest shelf. So to be emotionally direct and sincere and available was very punk in a weird way—punk to my family of origin, because they were not supposed to be emotional; punk to the toughness of SoCal hardcore punk music, which was my first god; and punk to Godard’s cool, Brechtian suspicion of emotional authenticity. It was a funny coming-of-age individuation story for me [laughs], because it’s saying to Godard, You have some blind spots, you have some rackets that you’re running. Same to you, punk world. This desire to be seen and connect felt subversive. Maybe it’s the beginning of the influence of therapy on my filmmaking too.

Is Eating Sleeping Waiting and Playing (1999) a continuation of that emotional, observational approach?

This was another experience in learning a documentary way of shooting, where you only have half a plan of what you’ll shoot on any given day. You’re hunting for, not completing, a preconceived idea: the film and my direction are reactive and changing all the time. I love how alive that is, and I think that way of being on set has continued to influence everything I do. And maybe more than that, Eating Sleeping Waiting and Playing was one more experiential step in working out a particular voice—a kind of cultural observation, mixed with something like humor, or just absurdism, mixed with an instinct toward and pleasure in connecting with the person in front of the camera. There’s a cinematic mischievousness that wants to be kind of funny and wants to be kind of critical. This project helped me play in that vein and, equally importantly, show that side of myself to an audience, get a response, and develop trust through that.

I want to stay in the documentary world, since you return there often. Between your narrative features Thumbsucker and Beginners, you made a feature-length documentary, Does Your Soul Have a Cold? (2007). It’s not included in this box set, but I’d love to hear what motivated this project.

Thumbsucker wasn’t the experience I was hoping for, and I wanted to go back and engage in a kind of filmmaking which was easier, where you don’t have to write a script, where you’re making decisions on the fly. And I had a real ambition to do stuff that was just more socially engaged, that reflected and carried all the interests and concerns I had in art school. I also wanted to make a documentary that felt like a novel, that had a pattern or focus on a particular situation—in this case, being depressed and taking antidepressants in Japan—but in a ruminating, lyrical, novelistic way. Looking back, the cosmos of inner confusion–pain-depression is an unacknowledged theme in all my work. And that fits, as depression is insidious, and sneaky, convincing you it’s neutral; it hides well.

A Mind Forever Voyaging Through Strange Seas of Thought Alone (2013) has that socially engaged ambition behind it too.

That project was commissioned by SFMOMA. They invited a bunch of artists to come to Los Altos, a town in Silicon Valley, famous for being where Steve Jobs began Apple in his parents’ garage. In researching the history of that town, I became curious about all the famous “futurists” who worked at those companies, and the myths of a much better utopian future that run through that culture. I had the idea of interviewing not the adults who are coming up with these ideas and corporate policies but their children.

This project also reflects a shift in my work that came with becoming a parent, and being exposed to wonderful caretakers and educators who are deeply interested in children’s autonomy. So, while I’ve always been interested in younger people, and in taking them very seriously, as in the Air “All I Need” video, this was a piece that was explicitly about respecting and honoring the worldviews of nonadults. I got to practice a way to be in relation to these young people—how to produce a shoot that makes them feel safe and empowered, not judged or made cute. I loved the result, and the simplicity of it. Later, I took this idea, asking young people what they think the future will be like, and made it a part of my C’mon C’mon script.

Since you mentioned C’mon C’mon—a film scored by the Dessner brothers of the band the National—I want to talk about an earlier collaboration you had with them, I Am Easy to Find (2019). How did that project come about, and how did it change your approach to filmmaking?

The process that led to that was a very layered back-and-forth, beautifully hard to describe! I asked my agent to cold-call the band’s manager to see if they wanted to do a video. I was very lost after doing 20th Century Women, and I was looking for anything to move the atoms around. Matt Berninger, the singer, came back and said, “Can you do a film with our music, like a feature film?” I said that sounds like a lot, but he very generously began a very wide-open project where anything could happen.

They began by sharing their Dropbox with me, filled with fragments of songs, some finished songs, a lot of chord progressions done by Aaron and Bryce Dessner that Matt had yet to write lyrics for. So, I was to make some kind of film to songs that weren’t finished. But I knew all their albums very well and related to the kinds of things Matt writes about—he also writes from life, inserting concrete details into stories. After mulling over a bunch of ideas, the idea of a whole life, from birth to death, came to me. It seemed like that would relate to all of Matt’s unknown future lyrics?! Around the same time, I had met Alicia Vikander—also a fan of the band—and we wanted to do something together.

It was a very unique, lucky, and trusting collaboration. I said to them, “Can I treat your songs like a score?” That meant I had the separate stems and I could mess around with them—stretch things out, only play one or two tracks. I loved soloing tracks, hearing just one or two instruments, or just the vocals and the drums, and in the edit I got more adventurous, combining songs, rearranging the instrumentation, breaking a song down and editing its structure.

At first, I was very scared to show them what I did, but they were super generous and curious and liked what was happening, and I think they just enjoyed having this weird intervention in that stage of their career. They said, “Let’s make the album together; you come coproduce, and we’ll finish these songs and do a bunch of new songs that relate to your film but aren’t in the film.” And it became this crazy cross-feeding thing over a year or so. In my film, I was hearing one idea in a song and would play that out in the scenes you see in the movie, and the band would later see that and write a song about the thing they saw in the film. I wrote the children’s book that the dad is reading to young Alicia, just to avoid legal problems, and then later, unbeknownst to me, those words became lyrics in a song. In another song, the subtitles I wrote as the underlying structure of her life were put into an arrangement by Bryce and sung by the whole Brooklyn Youth Chorus. It was a very magical, fluid, multilayered collaboration. And it was wonderfully free with Alicia. It helped me be more brave with directing: put forward a simple but juicy prompt, open-ended; let the actor run with it and coauthor what happens; and my job is to capture that freedom.

You’ve had a long relationship to Talking Heads’ music, and you recently worked with the band. How did the “Psycho Killer” video come together?

I knew David Byrne a bit, and in 20th Century Women, there’s a Talking Heads subplot that I had to get his permission for, and he was very generous and supportive. Talking Heads: 77 was one of the first albums I owned, and its sound is a foundational mountain of creative excellence and possibility to me.

When the idea for a video for “Psycho Killer” came about, the Rhino–Warner Brothers people contacted my reps, and I knew it was going to be the typical video thing where I’m competing against five directors for the project. To me, “Psycho Killer,” like the whole 77 album, is one of the best pieces of art from the twentieth century. So, how in the hell do you come up with a video for that? I was walking around feeling grumpy and put-upon [laughs], and then the idea just came, in one stroke, mostly formed—a repetition of days, seen in the exact same twenty moments. And coming from my own therapy work, I have been very interested in emotions and how I so often don’t trust mine, or feel like I’m having the wrong emotion. I think it was from that experience that I had the urge for her to go through extreme emotions, the way they often feel on the inside, and to externalize them wildly. I thought it would be interesting if the world around her didn’t react accordingly. So we had seventeen moments done thirteen times. Each day, Saoirse Ronan played with one emotion across the whole day: “What is normal?,” people-pleasing, anxiety, loneliness, fear, sadness, disgust, anger/hate, curiosity, ridicule/rebellion, love, joy/freedom, calm/presence.

What are you carrying forward from that collaboration?

Saoirse was amazing to work with, so it was another experience in coauthoring with an actor, my job being to give them a sense of safety and a good prompt to jump off from. Saoirse showed me how I’m leaning toward something bigger than just naturalism, and how that can carry real emotions. It was very exciting to film and edit, and I like that energy in the final piece.

Kind of like I Am Easy to Find, it has this kind of impossible overarching structure—it says, “I’m going to show you a whole world,” which is impossible, and there’s something exciting about that failure to me. I like breaking things down to their composite parts, applying a rigid, clarifying form to the chaos of life that reveals it can never be clarified. But I think Saoirse’s bravery, her fire, and the not-giving-a-fuck in her performance are a bit unnerving, in a great way. So, I got to have a direct experience with that, tasted it, and I’m like, Oh, I want more of that, in a way that I didn’t know before because it was the first time I physicalized it.

Since then, I have come to understand that you don’t need Mike introducing the film for it to make you cry. He is always there in his films, which share a clear voice, a distinctive gaze, a personal approach to the filmmaking process. There is a sleight of hand to Mike’s work. Like magic, it’s not clear how it works or how it’s so deeply moving, nor is it easily explained. And as for the Hollywood part—well, Mike doesn’t play by those rules anyway. 

Mike Mills’s films are inhabited by human beings whose inner worlds engage us in ways that go beyond the plot or the exterior conflict. It is as if the voice of his cinema itself aligns us with the humans we are watching on-screen, and always in an unusually caring way. In his fiction features since Thumbsucker—Beginners (2010), 20th Century Women (2016), and C’mon C’mon (2021)—the characters are often flawed in their ability to function within a conventional family structure, and the tensions in their relationships are never portrayed stereotypically, in the vein of a partner or parent being an antagonistic force that needs to be overcome. The psychodynamics are rich and paradoxical in these films, just like in life.

Several of his male characters have left behind old ideas of masculinity—of meritocratic men who grapple with their missions or battles — and instead long for connection and intimacy in a world where those things are complicated, even in the closest of relationships. The films are defined by inactivity as a narrative force, telling silences, and looks that we the audience see, but no one else — stolen moments of lonely contemplation shared in a cinema, united with strangers.

The sophistication of Mike Mills’s design shows a deeper way for us to see the hidden interconnections of our unconscious motivations and movements. The real drama of life doesn’t happen when people yell at each other or make grand gestures, but rather in the tender, quiet moments of everyday despair or joy.

Like in Beginners: A man approaching midlife (Ewan McGregor) looks at his father (Christopher Plummer), who, having recently come out of the closet, is in love maybe for the first time, while dying from cancer. Could this observation of his father reshape the man’s ability to connect romantically? Slicing through many layers of human life in pursuit of love alongside loss, the film asks questions about how family dynamics affect us in our yearning to get close to one another. How does memory fail us, but also, in its glitches, give us the possibility to grow?

Or like in 20th Century Women: The film, set in 1979, portrays three women of different ages and their individual roles in guiding a teenage boy through a time of big societal changes. The mother (Annette Bening) was born in 1924 and had lived through the Great Depression, while her skater son (Lucas Jade Zumann) yearns for individuality in an increasingly fragmented world. As a multigenerational slice of American life in the late seventies and beyond, the film asks all the big questions: How do we live as children and parents? Why is communication with and connection to others so complicated? And why can’t fans of Black Flag be friends with people who like Talking Heads? 

And finally, like in C’mon C’mon: A radio documentarian (Joaquin Phoenix) has to bring along his estranged nephew (Woody Norman) as he travels across America asking children how they feel about the future. Genuinely listening, and searching for meaning through openness and curiosity, he grapples with how to negotiate the difficult truths of life with a nine-year-old, a process that in turn enriches his other relationships and helps him make sense of the constant flow of time and memory in his recordings.

Despite their intimacy as character studies, these films have an impressive scope. They are always reminding us of the specific historical and cultural context of who and what we are watching, and seeing the United States through the prism of individual human experience. This is the epic quality of Mike Mills’s body of work — the questioning of human scale in the endeavor of modernity that is the American experiment.

His montage sequences—composed of successions of moving-image scenes or still photographs and a narrator’s voice that situates the surrounding narrative within a broader cultural context— are a recurring formal trope in his work. They reveal the paradox of how culture shapes us while simultaneously being sold back to us as a veneer of change, even as the universe remains the same—how the personal tragedies of lived experience can never be reduced to social analysis.

In existential terms, the films question the meaning of the material world—our objects, our presidents, our genders, our beliefs — as seen through the everyday lives of ordinary people. Similarly, in the nephew and uncle’s grappling with the passage of time and constant change, there is an awareness that things will be forgotten, yet there is also a choice to remember. By recording their thoughts, they attempt, at the very least, to “see each other” along the way — through sound, images, and words.

Though they look clearly at human experience, these films are not made in the improvised, gritty manner of tough social realism. Mike’s formal originality and sense of exploration show us a way to bring the big machine of filmmaking to a much subtler place. A place I want to return to time and time again.

In the late nineties, my younger brother and I discovered Mike Mills’s music video for the band Air’s “All I Need,” and we couldn’t stop watching it. We had both skated, and watching skate kids in LA was of course cool, but more than that, watching this young couple in love felt like a radical act of quiet tenderness. The video felt like a documentary and a beautifully aestheticized photo-essay at the same time. It felt like no one with this particular gaze, this mix of hipness and craft, had ever bothered to look at teenagers in love like this before. Lyrical and specific at the same time. Anthropological yet kind and open.

I later learned that Mike is an excellent graphic designer who has also played in a couple of bands (while being a skater himself). So, the fact that his film work is so beautifully designed and musical in its structuring makes complete sense. 

Mike inspires the rest of us to be brave about our personal material, showing us how relevant even the tiniest domestic detail can be in a bigger existential perspective. 

Because I have had the fortune of working with some of the same collaborators as Mike—the editor Olivier Bugge Coutté, the cinematographer Kasper Tuxen, and the incredibly talented Elle Fanning—Mike and I have become friends, and it’s always such a pleasure to spend time with a guy who is so knowledgeable about art, cinema, and music. But what impresses me most is how well-read and smart Mike is about psychology, and the dynamics inside and between us all. He is truly a great observer of life.

I will sometimes meet people who haven’t seen a Mike Mills film, and I will try to explain what they are like. It will be impossible.

For me, this is Stanton’s greatest performance, specifically because it fuses together the two modes that predominate in his career, but are rarely explored, as they are here, as two faces of the same character. One is the frisky, misanthropic provocateur, the other the soulful dead-eyes survivor-witness, the man who’s seen too much. (You could call this the Repo Man vs. Paris, Texas perplex.) Because his unusual physiognomy ropes these two modes together in one body—Stanton appears to have jumped from limber, goofy teen to crushed senior citizen without bothering to visit middle age on the way—we can underestimate his range. But not here.

Our introduction to Jerry is one of the great scenes in the film. Hoffman’s Dembo rolls across the bed he has just shared with Theresa Russell—since Max has vengefully wrecked his parole, this has been a night of nonverbal reflection, a calm before some kind of storm—and dials a telephone number, asking for Jerry, a name we haven’t heard. The film then cuts ahead, to Jerry’s suburban backyard. The scene is suffocatingly vapid: kidney-shaped pool, floral shade umbrella, aluminum folding chairs, a thin margin of walkway, bounded by a high, seamless wooden fence, and Jerry’s new wife, trailing them from the grill to a table covered with pickles, chips, mustard, ketchup. Stanton relates his apparent good fortune in a sleepwalker’s drone: “Goin’ alright. After you fell, I pulled a few jobs and met Carol. She straightened me out. So I set myself up in the paint contracting business . . . Put that pool in last year, the only thing I need’s a new car . . .” When Carol (played by Rita Taggart) joins them at the table, she reveals that she, too, has a tropism for the criminal life: she seems to collect ex-cons for romantic partners. She asks Hoffman’s Max whether while on the inside he ran into her first husband, Lumpy. Max: “Yeah, I know Lumpy.” This tests Jerry’s patience: “What are we going to do, go down the whole damn list?” In retrospect, we may see this as a tiny first flare of Jerry’s awakening. Max, playing peacemaker, asks Jerry where he and Carol met, and Jerry replies, “Met her at Thirty-One Flavors, of all places.” Carol says, “He was thirty-two,” Jerry almost blushes, saying “Ain’t she a peach.” He knows the script to marital life. But for him it is only a script.

This is confirmed when Carol exits to the kitchen, to bring the men some beers. Jerry then makes it unmistakable that he’s been putting on an act for her, and possibly for himself. Between wolfish bites of burger that prefigure his impatience with every kind of delay, he lowers his vocal register and says to Max, “Get me out of here. They’re killing me. I can’t make this scene anymore. Get me out of here.” The lines are the film’s hinge; as Jerry’s mask falls instantly away, Max seems only halfway surprised. Jerry goes on swallowing barely chewed chunks of burger and adds, “You got somethin’, I know you got somethin’.” What Jerry means is a gig, a heist, a target for robbery, anything that will make him feel less dead inside.

Max: “Don’t you want to know what it is?”

Jerry: “I don’t give a damn what it is, let’s just do it.”

When Carol returns, it is with two beers but also with Jerry’s acoustic guitar, which she places in his hands. Possibly she sees his music as a sufficient container for his discontent. At first Jerry balks, embarrassed, but Max beckons to him: “What’s that walkin’ stick thing you used to play?”

“Walking stick? You mean ‘Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane?’”

Max: “Yeah, play that. C’mon, we got cause to celebrate.” An allusion lost on Carol. What Max and Jerry are now celebrating is a fresh partnership, one that will embolden an escalating series of robberies and eventually lead to Jerry’s death and Max shooting a policeman, murdering another accomplice, and being locked up again, presumably for good.

With smiles at first sheepish, then increasingly candid, Jerry sings: “Hand me down, my walking cane / Hand me down my walkin’ cane / Hand me down my walkin’ cane / I’m gonna leave this ball and chain.” The last line sounds good enough to him that his face splits in a real grin. Carol, the ball-and-chain in question, bobs her head encouragingly, not hearing the meaning of the song. Grosbard’s camera rises up, in the kind of crane shot traditionally used to end a film; in fact, this marks the end of the first half of Straight Time. Only as the frame widens do we see how closely this backyard is bounded by the high fence on all sides. Jerry has found his own captivity in the opposite sense that Max soon will, not by failing to achieve “straight time” but by achieving it too well; for him, the suburban monogamy, the pool and grilled burgers, all is as much a prison as anything he experienced on the inside.

Their very first job, the robbery of a high-stakes poker game, goes so wrong that the ostensible victims never even learn that their game has been cased. Max’s other confederate, who is meant to supply the weaponry, is a jelly-legged amateur, who not only arrives late but without the promised firepower. (In a film of brilliantly overlapping motifs and set pieces, this foreshadows Gary Busey’s cataclysmic failure as the getaway driver.) Jerry’s disappointment as the plan sours is a knife in the gut: he dropped out of suburbia, out of poolside burgers and beers, for this? Jerry expends his bitterness in a seething rant. “Man, this is very unprofessional . . . Goddamn it, I told you, I’m not taking that game without a shotgun. You can’t cover a fucking poker game without a shotgun, all right? The plan was to meet your friend with the shotgun we go in and do the job and we leave. We been sittin’ here all fucking night waiting for the guy with the shotgun and you want to take it with your cap pistol and I’m telling you it’s very unfuckingprofessional, all right?” Stanton’s exasperated emphasis on fucking and shotgun gives the speech an incantatory and prophetic power. At this moment he feels he might be the only competent criminal on the planet. The younger men are all predestined to fail the standard of his teachings.

It’s not wrong to say that Jerry plays Max’s father figure, very much like Willie Nelson is to James Caan in Michael Mann’s Thief (1981). (Mann had an uncredited hand in Straight Time’s script, and the research he conducted, interviewing lifelong criminals, appears to have strongly influenced his own work as a director.) Nevertheless, Stanton also vividly defines the childlike jubilation that still explodes from inside the jaded criminal veteran. It’s the adrenaline of an armed robbery, as much as the money, that is his intoxicant. As we understood when he mock-humbly accepted the proffered guitar, Jerry is a performer, one who loves to play-act the “bad robber” to Max’s “good robber.” When they rob a bank, he terrifies the tellers and customers with feral glee: “You in love with me? Answer me, you in love with me? Then stop looking at me motherfucker, or I’ll blow your goddamn face off!” Max then has to console the tellers enough to get them back up to open their cash drawers.

Seishun (youth) links Cruel Story to a pop-culture phenomenon of its era: the wave of taiyozoku-eiga (sun tribe films), launched by the 1956 screen adaptations of Shintaro Ishihara’s novels Season of the Sun and Crazed Fruit. These works, which glamorized the disaffection of Japanese adolescents, became the target of public accusations of immorality and were a focus of cultural commentary claiming a generational breakdown in Japanese society. Cruel Story of Youth contains some typical features of the sun tribe films and other contemporary Japanese movies about young people, including themes of prostitution and abortion; the iconography of motorbikes, motorboats, and Hawaiian shirts; and a male protagonist given to fits of violent rage.

Monogatari (story), a word that frequently appears at the end of Japanese literary titles, could be read as an indication that Oshima, though very much a modernist in his style and choice of subject matter, was offering a film situated within the traditions of classical narrative cinema. Indeed, his title for the first draft of the script, Awakening of Love and Humanity, seemed to promise a work that would share the humanist idealism of one of Shochiku’s star directors, Keisuke Kinoshita.

The word that lays Oshima’s true intentions bare is zankoku (cruelty). Shochiku had disapproved of the ending of Oshima’s first film, A Town of Love and Hope (1959), finding it too “cruel.” In preparing his follow-up, Oshima took his employer’s objections to heart and, instead of softening his attitude, resolved to go further in his portrayal of “cruelty” as “the essence of the present.” Awakening of Love and Humanity became Cruel Story of Youth, a film that sees the situation of young people in an increasingly affluent and conservative Japan in terms of two kinds of cruelty—that which attacks them from the outside, and that which they summon from within in a doomed attempt to defend and assert themselves. The word cruelty also defines the director’s approach. Determined to “destroy the old naturalist methods” of Japanese cinema, Oshima wages a battle against them on all fronts: narrative, representation, image, sound.

Oshima builds Cruel Story of Youth in bold, elliptical strokes. The film follows two lovers: university student Kiyoshi (Yusuke Kawazu) and third-year high-school student Makoto (Miyuki Kuwano). Their revolt against society takes the degraded form of a serial con they run on middle-aged businessmen. Makoto serves as bait, enabling Kiyoshi to catch the men as they try to bring her into love hotels and giving him the chance to extort money from them. The political context of the couple’s delinquency is broadly but forcefully defined. Early in the film, Kiyoshi and Makoto watch a street demonstration against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security (Anpo) Treaty. The pair stand on the sidelines without participating, as if unable to see how organized action could transform their lives. The film goes on to suggest that political apathy is a historical consequence of the failure of the early postwar period’s left-wing struggles, in which Oshima himself took part as a student at Kyoto University in the early 1950s. It is likely that he saw something of himself in one of the film’s secondary characters, the clinician Akimoto (Fumio Watanabe, who would go on to be one of Oshima’s favored actors), an idealist who has lost his belief in the possibility of revolutionary change.

The society for which Kiyoshi and Makoto feel instinctive hatred hardly bothers to constrain them. Makoto’s father (Jun Hamamura) explains his refusal to exert authority over her by saying that, in light of Japan’s social decline, it’s no longer reasonable to expect individuals to behave morally. Makoto’s school seems to be run with a similar laissez-faire approach, as can be discerned from the laid-back body language of her cigarette-smoking homeroom teacher (Toshiko Kobayashi). With nothing keeping her on the straight and narrow, Makoto gets drawn into Kiyoshi’s world, whose two bases are a bar frequented by sleazy underworld types and the small apartment he and his roommate (Shinji Tanaka) take turns using for trysts with girlfriends.

Within this atmosphere of indifference, violence, and discontent, the love between Kiyoshi and Makoto develops like a mutation. In one of Cruel Story’s most memorable sequences—which, thirty-five years later, Oshima included in his British Film Institute–commissioned documentary 100 Years of Japanese Cinema—Kiyoshi and Makoto go to a log pier at Tokyo Bay. Long shots emphasize the stillness and depopulation of the site. Riichiro Manabe’s eerie modernist score suggests that the world is in a trance. As Kiyoshi fondles the barely conscious Makoto, Oshima cuts to the image of a dull sun. It casts a listless mood, which the assault that follows seems to maintain rather than rupture. If the sun, as Oshima later explained in an interview, is an evocation of the Anpo protests (a link reinforced by the dubbed-in sound of a passing airplane), then Kiyoshi’s rape of Makoto can be understood both as a revelation of the discreet violence of Japan’s rightward shift and as a misdirected protest against it. The camera tilts down to the logs, along which the camera tracks calmly toward Makoto, who is lying face up, Kiyoshi’s shirt spread over her body, as Kiyoshi dives naked into the water. Throughout this lengthy sequence, music, camera movement, and elliptical cutting create psychological distance and point toward inexorable, if invisible, external forces.

The push-pull effect of Oshima’s style here is characteristic of a film that, from beginning to end, declares the independence of its author. Putting human figures at the edge of the GrandScope frame and filming them in uncomfortable close-ups that often seem about to fracture, Oshima highlights the instability of his characters’ relationships with one another and with their surroundings. By omitting transitional shots and explanations, Oshima sets the characters adrift in space and time, forcing viewers to drift with them. The visual flatness created by cinematographer Takashi Kawamata’s telephoto lens adds to the unmoored and abrupt quality of the narrative. In exterior long takes, the warmth of very-early-morning light defamiliarizes the garishness of hyper-commercial Tokyo, while the director makes known his opposition to institutional preference by using a handheld camera (as Oshima later noted, “at Shochiku at that time . . . the thing they hated the most was images shaking”).

Oshima’s use of color in Cruel Story of Youth manages to be at once lurid and austere. The early sections of the film are emphatically red: you see the color in everything from the main titles to a pair of parked cars featured in the opening shot to the flags that fill the screen during the protest scene. Eventually, red becomes the color most closely associated with the central couple. After Kiyoshi has raped Makoto a second time (taking out on her his shame over the financial victimization he has just suffered at the hands of a group of pimps), Makoto thinks she sees in Kiyoshi’s face that he loves her. Oshima shoots this moment of recognition against a dislocated blackness in which two blurry red lights gleam as if signaling distress.

After Makoto tells Kiyoshi that she is pregnant, he arranges for her to have an abortion at Akimoto’s clinic. Visiting her after the procedure, Kiyoshi takes two apples from a paper bag—one red, one green. Kiyoshi greedily devours the green one (“as if chewing on the pain of youth,” Oshima wrote in the shooting script), but not without first placing the red one under the sleeping Makoto’s chin as a sign of love. Oshima, who later said of this scene that it caused his heart to leap, captures all this in the movie’s longest take, putting Kawazu’s strength of concentration to the test and forcing viewers to respond to Kiyoshi’s hopeless passion for freedom.

Oshima’s vigorous and astringent style won the approval of critics, who were quick to compare Cruel Story of Youth to the French New Wave films that had premiered in Japan during the months before its release. Nine other Shochiku productions made by young directors acquired the label nuberu bagu when they appeared later in 1960: in addition to Oshima’s next two films, The Sun’s Burial and Night and Fog in Japan, there were Yoshishige Yoshida’s Good-for-Nothing and Blood Is Dry, Masahiro Shinoda’s One-Way Ticket to Love and Dry Lake, Tsutomu Tamura’s Volunteering for Villainy (a.k.a. The Samurai Vagabonds), Osamu Takahashi’s Only She Knows, and Eitaro Morikawa’s The Tragedy of Bushido. Though Oshima objected to the “new wave” tag as a code phrase advertising sex and violence, he also acknowledged that before starting production on Cruel Story of Youth he had seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), which he admired for the director’s “active involvement” and for the way the film reveals “the continuity of discontinuity.” In Cruel Story of Youth, Oshima chooses the milieu, the situations, and, broadly speaking, the form of a crime film for the same reason Godard does in Breathless: to highlight the incoherence of the main characters’ relationship to their society while showing how this incoherence contaminates their relationship to each other.

The two directors are similar in their awareness that a film is, as Oshima put it, “a document of its actors.” As much as Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, Kawazu represents a kind of international masculinity that was in vogue in the year 1960. Though his veneer of swaggering derision is thinner than Belmondo’s—and though he seems amused by other people, while Belmondo’s humor arises from his amusement at himself—Kawazu is no less convincing than Belmondo in embodying the restless, predatory nature of youthful male rebellion. His affectless performance, eschewing conventional signifiers of anguish and emotional release, frustrates the viewer’s efforts to sympathize with Kiyoshi but bears the stamp of reality.

Meanwhile, Kuwano’s performance (like that of Jean Seberg in Breathless) creates a continuity of feeling and purpose that conveys an intense indifference to the traps the screenplay sets for her character. As one of the pimps spins her around brutally in the bar, Makoto withdraws into an alcoholic haze, whose space and rhythm the actor delineates with the same automatic cool that later marks the character’s growing mastery of the gestures of cigarette smoking. More than twenty years after its release, Oshima watched a TV broadcast of Cruel Story of Youth and was surprised to find that “even in the contemporary era, when women have changed completely, Miyuki Kuwano’s role was drawn so carefully that it still held up. Clearly, by the final scenes, the woman is the stronger one. She asserts herself properly. That was really a self-discovery for me, revisiting it.”

In the end, Kiyoshi gives his life to protect Makoto from being prostituted by a gangster (Kei Sato) and his hoods. Paradoxically, this act of self-sacrifice happens right after Kiyoshi breaks up with her, saying he sees no way for them to avoid ending up as mere things to be sold and consumed. Here lies the crucial contradiction of the film. Unable to avoid this fate, the couple perversely embrace it. Makoto, who has hated turning herself into a thing for sale to carry out their scheme, now proposes that they put it into action one more time. This decision leads to a bloody finale, shot and cut with relentless brilliance, in which Oshima anticipates the intertwining of love and violent death in his later masterpieces such as The Man Who Left His Will on Film (1970), In the Realm of the Senses (1976), and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983).

Looking back on the months of artistic concentration and political upheaval that saw the creation of Cruel Story of Youth, The Sun’s Burial, and Night and Fog in Japan, Oshima remarked that “the year 1960 determined my entire cinematic life.” Each of the great films he made that year points toward key aspects of his later achievements, but it is the first of the three that, through its rawness, ferocity, and glimmers of tenderness, captures the richest sense of freedom and discovery.

This month on the Criterion Channel, crank up the volume on our playlist of (actually good) rock biopics that go beyond cliché to explore the elusive place where inspiration sparks and musical legends are born. Our Southern Gothic collection serves up a thick gumbo of hothouse drama, while Desert Trips brings together four psychedelic journeys through the sun-scorched Southwest. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including the classic high school shocker Carrie, a pair of rousing dispatches from the front lines of labor struggle by Barbara Kopple, a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing with Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen, exclusive premieres of an acclaimed American indie and a tender Indian love story, and a revelatory, newly restored portrait of James Baldwin.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

When rock stars get the Hollywood treatment, the result is often a lackluster re-creation of their career’s most famous highs and lows. But the best musical biopics do more than just cover their subjects’ greatest hits, adopting unconventional modes of storytelling that go deeper than mere mimicry. These films find visionary directors putting their imprints on the brilliant, often tumultuous lives of boundary-breaking musical icons: Ken Russell elevating one of the original celebrities of the classical world to the heights of glam-rock outrageousness in Lisztomania; Susanna Nicchiarelli reckoning with the pain and regret that fame leaves in its wake in Nico, 1988; and Todd Haynes teasing out the enigmatic multiplicity of Bob Dylan by enlisting six different actors to portray him in I’m Not There. In thrall to the ecstatic power of music, these portraits explode rise-and-fall conventions to reveal deeper truths about identity, artistry, and the myths we create around both.

Coprogrammed by Yasi Salek, writer and host of the podcast Bandsplain

FEATURING: Lisztomania (1975), The Buddy Holly Story (1978), Amadeus (1984), The Hours and Times (1992), Velvet Goldmine (1998), 24 Hour Party People (2002), Control (2007), I’m Not There (2007), Nowhere Boy (2009),* The Runaways (2010),* Love & Mercy (2015), Nico, 1988 (2017)*

COMING SEPTEMBER: The Doors (1991)

Set against the decaying grandeur of the American South, these sweltering sagas of family secrets, repressed desires, and twisted love are steeped in the region’s vibrant folklore and haunted history. Featuring adaptations of definitive southern writers like Tennessee Williams (Baby Doll) and Flannery O’Connor (Wise Blood), lurid chronicles of families in decline (Written on the Wind, Eve’s Bayou), terrifying thrillers built around crazed villains (Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear, as well as Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s remake of the latter) and hothouse tales of simmering lust (The Beguiled, The Paperboy), this selection of southern-gothic greats abounds in the eccentric characters and eerie atmosphere that define the genre.

FEATURING: The Night of the Hunter (1955), Baby Doll (1956), Written on the Wind (1956),* The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Cape Fear (1962),* The Beguiled (1971),* Wise Blood (1979), Down by Law (1986), Wild at Heart (1990),* Cape Fear (1991),* Eve’s Bayou (1997), The Paperboy (2012),* Wildcat (2023) 

COMING SEPTEMBER 1: The Beguiled (2017)

The vast, arid landscapes of the American Southwest become hallucinatory expanses of existential reckoning in these sun-blasted journeys into a harsh, unforgiving no-man’s land. From the counterculture disillusionment of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point to the aching desolation of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas to the feverish romanticism of David Lynch’s Wild at Heart, these films turn scorched highways and otherworldly terrain into unforgettable projections of their characters’ inner worlds.

FEATURING: Zabriskie Point (1970), Paris, Texas (1984), Wild at Heart (1990), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)

Beloved for their work in both music and comedy, Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen have left an indelible imprint on pop culture with their cult-favorite sketch show Portlandia. In this special edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, the pair join Criterion president Peter Becker at Portland’s PAM CUT Cinema for a hilarious conversation about the films they’ve loved, obsessed over, and want to share with each other and the world. Touching on everything from what they watch on tour and their all-time favorite movies about bands (that aren’t Spinal Tap) to their reverence for stars ranging from Greta Garbo to Divine, the pair blend quick-witted banter with wide-ranging cinephilic knowledge for a celebration of auteurist favorites and pop pleasures alike.

Towering literary lion, fierce social critic, and inimitable cultural icon James Baldwin opened up a new space for the frank discussion of race, sexuality, and identity in American society. He also left behind a dynamic cinematic legacy, as seen in these portraits that capture his electrifying presence and passionate eloquence. Across his screen appearances, Baldwin delivered a far-reaching commentary on everything from art to religion to love to liberation to his experiences as a queer Black man who lived much of his life abroad but who never stopped examining his own complex relationship to the United States.

FEATURES: I Heard It Through the Grapevine (1982), James Baldwin: The Price of the Ticket (1989)

SHORTS: Baldwin’s Nigger (1968), Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970), James Baldwin: From Another Place (1973)

STREAMING PREMIERES

Featuring a new introduction by director Sophy Romvari, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

A singular coming-of-age story, this revelatory feature debut by Sophy Romvari heralds the arrival of a major new cinematic voice. In the late 1990s, eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her Hungarian Canadian family relocate to a new home on Vancouver Island, but their fresh start is interrupted by increasingly dangerous behavior from her eldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes). At wit’s end, their parents are presented with a shattering choice. Audaciously layering the past and the present until they converge in a moment of devastating emotional clarity, Blue Heron evokes the languid haze of a childhood summer and the hidden tensions rippling beneath it.

In a tight-knit Dominican American community in the Bronx, Rico (Juan Collado) is hustling his way through the summer, selling bootleg “nutcracker” cocktails out of a beach cooler while chasing girls. But when his girlfriend, Destiny (Destiny Checo), begins crashing at his family’s place, their small apartment becomes a stage for their messy, complicated relationship—and soon they must reckon with the sobering reality of growing up too fast in a city that waits for no one. Channeling the electrifying naturalism of John Cassavetes, writer-director Joel Alfonso Vargas turns his hometown into the heartbeat of his crackling debut feature, teaming up with street-cast acting talent to deliver a deeply authentic look at the tapestry of urban life and the ups and downs of young love. 

The exquisitely tender feature debut from Rohan Kanawade is a watershed event in Indian cinema: a compassionate vision of queer romance fighting to blossom amid the forces of tradition, class prejudice, and deep-seated cultural repression. Following the death of his father, thirtysomething Anand (Bhushaan Manoj) is compelled to return from Mumbai for a ten-day mourning period in his hometown in the rugged countryside of western India. There, he reconnects with Balya (Suraaj Suman), a farmer and childhood friend with whom he once shared an unspoken connection. As a budding love story plays out in moments of beautifully observed intimacy, Anand must decide the fate of a relationship born under duress. 

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Fifteen years after the end of Jim Crow, writer, activist, and cultural critic James Baldwin returns to the American South for a thought-provoking journey that brings the region’s past and present into revealing dialogue. As he revisits the major sites of the civil rights struggle—from Birmingham and Selma, Alabama, to Atlanta, Georgia—Baldwin explores both what has changed in the intervening years and what, tellingly, has not. Featuring illuminating conversations with prominent activists and cultural figures like Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Oretha Castle Haley, and Chinua Achebe as well as everyday people, I Heard It Through the Grapevine offers an essential perspective on the changing face of the South, the legacy of the civil rights movement, and all that remains to be done.

With this landmark debut feature, director Ebrahim Golestan delivered a jolt of modernism to prerevolution Iranian cinema, laying the groundwork for the country’s first, still often overlooked new wave. When a mysterious woman (feminist literary icon Forugh Farrokhzad) abandons a baby in the backseat of his cab one night, Tehran taxi driver Hashem (Zakaria Hashemi) is launched on a journey through the city’s unfeeling bureaucracy as he attempts to find a home for the infant—a situation that soon puts him in conflict with his nurturing girlfriend Taji (Taji Ahmadi). Melding the influences of Persian poetry, 1960s European art cinema, and Wellesian expressionism, Brick and Mirror offers a portrait of a crumbling relationship that also functions as a devastating dissection of a society poisoned by fear, distrust, and patriarchal arrogance. 

In 1948, Gainsborough Pictures—best known for its enormously popular gothic melodramas—embarked on a rare prestige project: an anthology-film adaptation of four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham titled Quartet, soon followed by two similarly structured follow-ups, Trio and Encore. Featuring British acting legends like Dirk Bogarde, Jean Simmons, and Glynis Johns, these exquisitely crafted miniatures represent literary adaptation at its most elegant, drawing on Maugham’s famously keen insights into human nature to tell stories of misguided passions, creative obsession, social ambition, and unexpected reversals of fortune.

FEATURING: Quartet (1948), Trio (1950), Encore (1951)

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Med Hondo’s one-of-a-kind musical spectacular explores the effects of French colonialism across centuries of oppression and injustice, resistance and revolution.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Hondo, African-cinema scholar Aboubakar Sanogo, and cinematographer François Catonné.

Teenage lovers turn to a life of crime on the margins of postwar Tokyo in Nagisa Oshima’s scorching tale of toxic love in a toxic world.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A Town of Love and Hope (1959), Oshima’s first feature film; Tomorrow’s Sun (1959), a short film by Oshima; and an interview with film scholar Tony Rayns.

Luis Buñuel’s final film brings full circle the director’s preoccupation with the darker side of desire through the story of an urbane widower tortured by lust for an elusive woman.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An interview with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, a documentary featuring actors Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina, a 2012 documentary on Buñuel featuring members of the crew, and more.

A sublimely sinister Robert Mitchum is evil incarnate in Charles Laughton’s sole directorial effort, a horror movie with the quality of a Grimm fairy tale.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A documentary on the making of the film, interviews with Laughton biographer Simon Callow and cinematographer Stanley Cortez, a clip from The Ed Sullivan Show in which cast members perform a scene deleted from the film, and more.

“The summer I killed my father, I was ten years old . . .” In 1960s Louisiana, a young girl sees her well-to-do family unravel in the wake of her father’s infidelities.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Kasi Lemmons, cinematographer Amy Vincent, producer Caldecot Chubb, and editor Terilyn A. Shropshire; interviews with Lemmons and composer Terence Blanchard; and more.

Alcoholism, nymphomania, impotence, and deadly jealousy are just a few of the toxins coursing through a massively wealthy, degenerate Texan oil family in Douglas Sirk’s operatic melodrama.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: The 2008 documentary Acting for Douglas Sirk and an interview with film scholar Patricia White.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Urgent, eye-opening dispatches from the front lines of American class struggle, these galvanizing documentaries by Barbara Kopple—both winners of the Academy Award for Best Documentary—are among the most essential films ever made about organized labor. Filmed over several years, Harlan County USA is a powerful immersion into a small Kentucky town struggling to stay afloat amid a thirteen-month coal miners’ strike as Appalachian grit goes up against the entrenched forces of capitalism. In American Dream, Kopple travels to Austin, Minnesota, to document a Reagan-era meatpackers’ strike against Hormel Foods, capturing the heated backroom negotiations, competing media wars, and devastating human cost of a battle that leaves no part of the community untouched. 

FEATURING: Harlan County USA (1976), American Dream (1990)

Featuring an introduction by Grady Hendrix, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

Raw, gritty, intensely angry visions of individuals pushed to the brink by a corrupt society, the films of Hong Kong action renegade Ringo Lam scorch the screen with an anarchic fury. His action classic City on Fire offered Chow Yun-fat one of his meatiest roles and inspired QuentinTarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. With his further entries in the “On Fire” series and later triumphs like the propulsive handover-era thriller Full Alert, Lam doubled down on social criticism without stinting on the action, offering a searing portrait of systemic moral breakdown.

FEATURING: City on Fire (1987), Prison on Fire (1987), School on Fire (1988), Wild Search (1989), Prison on Fire II (1991), Full Alert (1997), Victim (1999)

Julien Duvivier was among the definitive craftsmen of classical French cinema, bringing expressive camera work, atmospheric mise-en-scène, and a darkly lyrical sensibility to often-overlooked jewels across an extraordinary array of genres. His deeply shadowed, fatalistic early sound films David Golder and La tête d’un homme anticipate the poetic-realist style that would come to define 1930s Gallic cinema, and which would find one of its fullest expressions in the intoxicatingly doom-laden, Algiers-set underworld drama Pépé le Moko. From the elegant, wistful romance of Un carnet de bal to the startlingly bleak noir pessimism of Panique to the charmingly imaginative meta-comedy of La fête à Henriette, Duvivier maintained a master’s touch that won him the admiration of titans like Orson Welles and Jean Renoir, who declared, “If I were an architect and I had to build a monument to the cinema, I would place a statue of Julien Duvivier at the entrance.”

FEATURING: David Golder (1930), Poil de carotte (1932), La tête d’un homme (1933), They Were Five (1936), Un carnet de bal (1937), Pépé le moko (1937), The End of the Day (1939), Lydia (1941), Panique (1946), Anna Karenina (1948), La fête à Henriette (1952)

SHORT FILMS

Like his acclaimed feature Happyend, now streaming on the Criterion Channel, these short films by Neo Sora display both his keen eye for vivid cinematic details and ability to connect intimate human stories with broader social and political questions. While The Chicken and A Very Straight Neck are striking adaptations of short works by the Japanese writers Naoya Shiga and Momoe Narazaki, respectively, Sugar Glass Bottle draws from Sora’s own childhood experiences and is very much a thematic precursor to Happyend. 

FEATURING: The Chicken (2020), Sugar Glass Bottle (2022), A Very Straight Neck (2025)

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Out-of-print Criterion LaserDisc Edition featuring audio commentary by screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen and author Laurent Bouzereau

A bullied teenager (Sissy Spacek) unleashes her powers of telekinesis in Brian De Palma’s classic, still-shocking adaptation of the novel by Stephen King.

Posing as a police officer, a sociopathic ex-con (Alec Baldwin) embarks on a wild crime spree with a detective in hot pursuit in this marvelously offbeat, black-comic caper.

Robert Altman updates Raymond Chandler for the liberated, hedonistic 1970s as private eye Philip Marlowe (Elliott Gould) is drawn into a labyrinth of murder and deception. 

An intricate game of erotic entrapment unfolds as an architect (James Spader) begins to suspect the dark secrets his too-good-to-be-true wife (Mädchen Amick) may be hiding.

MUSIC FILMS

Discover the glorious, chaotic story of beloved Minneapolis rock band the Replacements through the testimonies of the fans who revere them.

Oppressed musicians set out to get even with the mafia-like figures who exploit them in one of the definitive reggae films, an effortlessly cool immersion into Jamaica’s 1970s music scene.

DOCUMENTARIES

An intimate cinema-verité documentary explores the myriad forms of “women’s work” through a portrait of three mothers whose lives intersect at a twenty-four-hour daycare center.

This irreverent blend of documentary, drama, musical, political satire, and intellectual sparring match sets out to answer a provocative question: Does America have a ruling class?

Hud belongs to a series of films Ritt made during the sixties that tackled major cinematic genres, often shaping their traditional motifs to suit his evolving cultural vision. In fashioning this film, Ritt displays a sharp and penetrating take on the American landscape. Unlike two revisionist westerns released the year before, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country, which evoke nostalgia over the passing of the Old West, Hud betrays no feelings of regret in deconstructing the western hero, instead exposing his macho persona as empty and amoral, his mythology as bankrupt.

Ritt got his start in theater and then live television during its formative period. He entered both worlds as an actor, working first for the Federal Theatre Project—an outgrowth of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration—whose head, Hallie Flanagan, felt that art was integral to the fabric of communities. Her vision of theater as a social force profoundly shaped the Group Theatre, which became the definitive influence on Ritt’s career and his artistic philosophy from the time he joined in 1937. The communal spirit of the Group stayed with Ritt, who regarded filmmaking as a collective experience, rejecting the cult of the director. This was not only a working method; the creation of community also became a thematic thread running through his films. Ritt liked to surround himself with people he trusted and valued, so he would collaborate repeatedly with Howe, editor Sidney Levin, cinematographer John A. Alonzo, and production designers Tambi Larsen and Walter Scott Herndon. This attitude extended to writers as well. Ritt loved working with husband-and-wife team Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., who together wrote the screenplays for eight of his films, including Hud, and with Walter Bernstein, who wrote two of Ritt’s most personal films, The Molly Maguires (1970) and The Front (1976).

Another profound influence on Ritt was Elia Kazan, who introduced him to the Group, first recommending him to teach Luther Adler to box for his starring role in Clifford Odets’s 1937 play Golden Boy. Ritt was also given a small part in the production. Kazan, of course, would go on to become America’s most important midcentury theater director as well as an Academy Award–winning filmmaker. The two would remain close until 1952, when Kazan named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This committee’s hearings, and the subsequent blacklisting of alleged communists by Hollywood studios, played a central role in Ritt’s life and affected his career in significant ways, including his directing and producing The Front, the first Hollywood film about the blacklist.

After World War II, Ritt had gravitated to the new medium of television and, between 1950 and 1952, found success acting in, directing, or producing more than one hundred dramas, primarily for the anthology series Danger and Somerset Maugham TV Theatre. His greatest triumph during this era, however, was his performance in the Danger episode “The Paper Box Kid,” written by Bernstein. One critic wrote that Ritt “may be the best actor on television.”

This period ended abruptly in 1952, when Ritt reported to work at CBS one day, only to find that he had been fired. He had been named in the newsletter Counterattack, published by three former FBI agents; it alleged that he had helped Communist Party locals of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union stage their annual show. Ritt would use that incident in The Front.

Unlike many of his friends, however, Ritt was not named or subpoenaed to testify before HUAC. His blacklisting from the television industry was based on unproven accusations and guilt by association. Years later, Ritt stated that he was never a member of the Communist Party: “I was always a very left-wing liberal, and I agreed with the Communists a lot of the time, but I didn’t agree with them some of the time, and that was bitter and angry.” Most often, he described himself as a “humanist.”

After a period during which he supported himself by teaching acting, Ritt arrived in Hollywood to direct No Down Payment (1957) for producer Jerry Wald, after making his debut as a film director earlier the same year with Edge of the City, shot in New York. Ritt and Wald went on to collaborate on three films starring Paul Newman—The Long, Hot Summer (1958), Paris Blues (1961), and Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man (1962)—and the director and actor formed a close friendship. Hud came about when Ravetch, who had cowritten The Long, Hot Summer, came across Larry McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By, and presented the project to Ritt and Newman, who had developed a partnership called Salem Productions in 1962. 

The novel is a coming-of-age story filtered through the consciousness of teenager Lonnie Bannon, who has lost both his parents and is living with his grandfather Homer. Homer’s stepson, Hud, is a minor character—a mean, consummately selfish, and disreputable man who is also a drunk and a womanizer. By centering their screenplay around this hedonist, Ravetch and Frank felt they had found a powerful theme: “the greed and materialism that was beginning to take over America.” Though many had advised him against taking the role, Newman enthusiastically embraced the idea of playing a thoroughly detestable man. He had already portrayed an impressive list of antiheroes in From the Terrace (1960), The Hustler (1961), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1962), but none of these characters compared with Hud, whom the film’s publicity described as “the man with the barbed wire soul,” and whom Newman compared to Richard III.

Ravetch and Frank made other modifications, some to tighten the relationships and sharpen the thematic focus. Hud becomes the son of Homer (Melvyn Douglas) rather than his stepson, meaning that he is also the uncle of Lonnie (Brandon de Wilde). This strengthens the connection between the three generations of Bannons. The family’s cook, in the novel, is a Black woman named Halmea; she is called Alma in the film and played by the white actress Patricia Neal. Ritt did not feel that Hud’s pursuit of a Black woman would be accepted by audiences at the time.

Hud works best if thought of as a modern western. It deliberately plays off George Stevens’s classic western Shane (1953), which, like Hud, frames the titular figure through the eyes of a younger character—here a boy, Joey Starrett. America’s reverence for childhood is central to the thematic structure of Shane, a portal through which Stevens allowed audiences to escape into a mythic past and to rediscover a purer world than the one contaminated by the war and its aftermath.

Joey is played by Brandon de Wilde, whose casting as the teenage Lonnie Bannon in Hud becomes a direct link between the two films. Both deal with a youngster’s education as he observes the deeds of the protagonist. Shane is first seen by Joey as an idealized figure in buckskin, astride a horse. Stevens’s mise-en-scène even suggests that Joey’s view may be a boy’s romantic vision: Shane and his horse seem to glide across the stream as he approaches the Starrett ranch. Shane presents its hero, lightning-fast with his pearl-handled guns, as a messianic savior who descends from the mountains to defend an emerging town and its homesteaders from lawlessness. Although he had hoped to abandon his life of violence by settling down with the Starretts, Shane is eventually forced to kill to protect the settlers.

Hud is introduced when his nephew goes to town looking for him. Lonnie’s first clue comes from a bar owner who is sweeping up broken glass at his place, the result of a fight started by Hud. Lonnie then finds his uncle’s pink Cadillac parked in front of the house of a married woman. Hud emerges, buttoning his shirt, boots in hand—this is clearly not Shane.

Like most westerns, Hud opens with the landscape: vast, lonely, and almost desertlike. There are few signs of civilization. Howe explained that he wanted the cinematography to emphasize “the harsh skies and flat glare”; he even decided to filter out the clouds. This first shot is beautifully rendered in black and white, accented by a ray of sunlight. The emptiness is soon undercut by the sight of a truck pulling a horse trailer. Ritt is calling attention to the disjunction between horse and rider, no longer a graceful unit but instead separated in two vehicles. Standing in contrast to this mechanical world and to Hud, whose Cadillac embodies it, is Homer, who represents the Old West. The generational conflict between father and son forms the basis of Lonnie’s education.

The name Homer suggests his epic status. The owner of the cattle ranch where Hud and Lonnie live and work, he is in love with the land and feels a strong connection to nature and the wild. If Hud is linked to his car, Homer is associated with his two Texas longhorns, symbols of the pioneer lifestyle. They also evoke another classic western, Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948), in which Thomas Dunson (John Wayne), starting with only two longhorns, founds a cattle empire and ultimately clashes with his surrogate son over its management. Hud, meanwhile, doesn’t do much of anything to contribute to the well-being of his father’s ranch.

To the shock and even chagrin of Ritt and Newman, upon the film’s release, viewers mostly gravitated toward Hud. Ritt underestimated his star’s magnetism, which triumphed over his character’s flaws. Hud also embodied what audiences have always admired about western heroes: their individualistic bravado, exemplified by Hud’s dislike for the government and the law. Newman’s performance also tempers the unpleasantness of his selfish persona: the twinkle in his eye, his offhand sweetness and sudden frankness, remain attractive despite the character’s unheroic behavior. Unlike the more inarticulate rebels of the fifties, Newman’s alienated misfits are typically garrulous, ironic, and witty. Ritt’s film often accentuates this unexpected charm, and even attempts to capitalize on Newman’s air of emotional vulnerability by suggesting that Hud’s harshness may have resulted from the death of his older brother—Lonnie’s father—for which Hud was in part responsible.

Another factor mitigating Hud’s iniquity is the overwhelming aura of death that permeates the film. Early in the story, Homer calls Hud home to examine a dead heifer on the property. When they drive out to look, Ritt cuts to a shot of buzzards in a tree, which fills the side of the frame. These vultures hold dominion over the scene, just as their image hovers over the rest of the film.

Against Hud’s advice, Homer brings in a government veterinarian, who concludes that the heifer died of foot-and-mouth disease and that all of the Bannon’s cattle must therefore be destroyed. This brutal, horrifying slaughter is the film’s most graphic sequence. The passive beasts are rounded up and herded into a large pit, where they are surrounded by ranch hands who shoot until all are dead. The sounds of the frightened, dying cattle and the rifle fire are all that we hear as the scene plays out.

When Hud inherits a share of the ranch at the film’s end, it seems probable that he will simply turn it over for lucrative oil drilling, which his father has steadfastly refused to do. His actions have hastened his father’s death; indeed, in the novel he actually shoots the dying Homer. Easily accommodating himself to the loss of the patriarch he has at least symbolically killed, Hud turns his attention to the looming oil deals that will consolidate his new position of power. Whereas in classic westerns the acquisition of land is seen as an opportunity to grow and build, in Hud Ritt demonstrates the heartless exploitation that lies in western expansionism.

At the conclusion of McMurtry’s novel, Lonnie, having rejected Hud, simply takes off for the open road in true American fashion. Catching a ride with a truck driver who remembers Homer, Lonnie seems to be returning in spirit to his grandfather. An early version of the screenplay closed the same way, but Ritt ultimately chose to end the film more brutally, by keeping the focus on Hud. After Lonnie says goodbye and walks away, Hud returns to the house alone, and the screen door slams behind him. Here, Ritt quotes John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), in which the departing figure of Ethan Edwards (Wayne) is framed in a doorway and then disappears as the door swings shut. Ethan understands that, as Shane says, “there is no living with a killing,” and that there is no room for him in his united family. Hud, the amoral modern westerner, has instead taken over the ranch. Rejected by his nephew, whose ethical sense has been shaped by his grandfather, Hud is left alone inside the house and in possession of the future.

In Martin Scorsese’s 1974 comedy-romance Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Ellen Burstyn plays Alice, a freshly minted widow and single mother, thirty-five years old and tentatively ready for a new life. She goes shopping for herself, ending up with a pair of sensible bone-colored pumps and a simple green wrap dress accented with a jaunty black-and-white polka-dot scarf. It’s the kind of outfit worn by countless working women of the era, though the job Alice is seeking isn’t the secretarial sort; she’s hoping, after a yearslong detour, to finally fulfill her ambition of becoming a singer. Alice has been to the beauty parlor too: her hair, previously a housewife’s practical, sideswept blond bob, is now a tousle of flirty curls, alive to the future and electrical with anticipation. In this moment, Burstyn shows us an Alice who’s suddenly aglow with possibilities—yet she doesn’t look exactly modern. The seventies are almost half over, and Alice is just catching up. Jane Fonda’s groovy-subversive shag in Alan J. Pakula’s 1971 Klute may have been a shout of rebellion heard by women round the world, but not by Alice. Busy with her household chores, a wisecracking kid, and an impossible-to-please husband, she simply hadn’t had time to notice.

Yet in its time, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore was the opposite of retrograde, especially for an American film released by a major American studio, in this case Warner Bros. The studios had been gradually picking up on the general static of women’s discontent: movies like Klute, featuring a woman—an escort—who makes her living off male desire without allowing her personal life to be ruled by it, and Frank Perry’s 1970 Diary of a Mad Housewife, in which Carrie Snodgress plays a homemaker who seeks release from her loveless marriage by launching an affair of her own, were mainstream pictures that echoed the greater social discord around them. But even within that framework, Alice was and is special. Like those two films, it had been directed by a man. But it’s so focused on everyday life—on one woman’s yearning to achieve her dreams even as she’s struggling simply to get by—that it becomes a feminist film merely by being human first. Burstyn’s Alice is conventional in many ways: she hasn’t picked up and left her husband—his death is the thing that forces her to make a new start. She’s an accidental heroine, and anyone who has ever felt their life springing out of control can feel kinship with her.

That’s the movie’s secret power. Alice wasn’t only for women who had already been energized by the feminist movement; it spoke to average, as well as perhaps slightly older, women who were reconsidering the hand they’d been dealt, who suddenly found themselves balking at the standards they’d been conditioned to meet in order to be considered good wives and mothers. Alice, in her baby-girl curls and tasteful and not particularly racy new knee-length dress, is taking her first step toward something that feels like freedom. She doesn’t know it yet, but in her new uniform, she’s ready for a revolution that will be waged not through ideology but through a drastic and sometimes painful reshaping of her own life. Scorsese and Burstyn—the star as well as the engine behind the project—had pulled off a sly miracle: their movie was nonthreatening and explosive at once. It had meaning precisely because it came with no agenda attached.

The plot of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—with its script by the great Robert Getchell, who would go on to write Bound for Glory (1976) and Mommie Dearest (1981)—is fairly straightforward, though its structure feels loose and free. In an early scene, we meet Burstyn’s Alice Hyatt; her uncommunicative and perpetually angry husband, Donald (Billy Green Bush); and her precocious twelve-year-old son, Tommy (Alfred Lutter), who, when we first see him, is frying his eardrums with Mott the Hoople’s “All the Way from Memphis” jacked up on the family stereo. Donald bellows at Alice. It’s her job to communicate with Tommy; this bright, beautifully strange kid is an alien to him. Yet we can see from their first exchange that Alice and Tommy speak the same language—we know she secretly thinks it’s funny when he swaps the usual contents of the sugar bowl for salt, spoiling his father’s iced coffee and instigating a tirade. Their connection is the crackling lifeline stretching through the movie.

Yet even before we can settle into this somewhat unsettling family groove, Donald is gone: a Coca-Cola delivery guy, he’s killed in a highway accident. (Scorsese shows us only the aftermath, in a tableau that’s both awful and gruesomely funny.) Alice is suitably shocked by her husband’s death—until she realizes that this is her chance to reclaim the dream she gave up when she married the domineering cad. She sells off most of the family’s belongings in a yard sale, bids a teary goodbye to her closest friend (played, beautifully, by Burstyn’s real-life bestie Lelia Goldoni), and, with Tommy in tow, leaves the crap town of Socorro, New Mexico, and heads out on the road, with Monterey, California—their Oz—in her sights. She’d grown up there, and done some singing there too. It was the last time she can remember feeling happy and free.

There are shades of the classic Hollywood woman’s movie to the story, pictures—like Mildred Pierce and Stella Dallas—in which mothers want the best for their children, often at the expense of their own happiness. But in those movies, men were mostly impediments to joy—better not to have one around at all. Alice presented a new model, one offering the hope of romantic fulfillment and reassurance that women’s lives can be multidimensional rather than constrictive.

Burstyn at the time was just off the making of The Exorcist, one of the most highly anticipated films of its era, and was already a bankable star. Warner Bros. wanted to do another movie with her, though she disliked most of the scripts she read; they were, she has said, “full of stereotypes—the woman as victim, the woman as helper.” Her agent started rooting around for something more suitable, and he came across Getchell’s script, which piqued Burstyn’s interest, though she felt it needed some tweaking. As she said in Mary Pat Kelly’s 1991 book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey, “Most scripts need to be polished, but this one needed to be ‘roughed up.’ It was good, but it seemed as if it were written for Doris Day and Rock Hudson.”

She also needed the right director, and she called Francis Ford Coppola for advice. He told her to take a look at a film called Mean Streets, which hadn’t yet been released. Burstyn responded to the movie’s brash inventiveness, and to the raffish energy of its star Harvey Keitel. But Mean Streets vibrates with testosterone; she needed to know whether Scorsese could direct a film about a woman’s experience. The two met, and she asked, “What do you know about women?” He said, “Nothing. But I’d like to learn.” Burstyn liked that answer. Together, they worked on the script, and eventually they’d incorporate some on-set improvisation as well. Burstyn loved the way Scorsese trusted his actors.

Although Alice would be Scorsese’s first movie for a major studio, it was his fourth overall, and the hardscrabble origins of his earlier films—including his woolly debut, Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), and Boxcar Bertha (1972), produced by Roger Corman—meant that he understood the necessity of preparation. He’d gotten in the habit of working out all his shots and angles in advance. “When I made films at New York University, you had to wait on line for the equipment,” he has said. “You couldn’t have a camera because so-and-so was using it that weekend. When you got the equipment was when you shot—there was no schedule.”

But Scorsese’s efficiency didn’t mean he was predictable. He opened Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore with a dream sequence masquerading as a flashback scene, a reverie drawn from the language of classic Hollywood camera work like that of Duel in the Sun, Gone with the Wind, East of Eden—and The Wizard of Oz. We see the young girl who will grow up to be Alice striding across a landscape of Old Hollywood sunset red as Alice Faye’s version of “You’ll Never Know” unfurls like a dandelion wish on the soundtrack. Little Alice clutches a doll in her arms as she outlines, in rather foulmouthed terms, her dreams of becoming a singer: “I can sing better than Alice Faye, I swear to Christ I can!” It’s a disorienting but great opening, a salvo indicating that no matter what we’re expecting, we’re not in Kansas anymore. The set for that opening scene alone cost eighty-five thousand midseventies dollars, and Warner Bros. wanted to cut it, but Scorsese prevailed. Its out-of-left-field weirdness now seems essential to the film. The sense of dislocation it teases out is the pleasing kind; you wonder, Where the heck is this thing going?

Alice and Tommy don’t quite know either. Though they’ve started their road trip with the utmost optimism, Monterey, as both a physical destination and a dream, is elusive. They stop off and settle for a while in Phoenix, where Alice does manage to land a peanuts-paying job as a lounge singer. She also attracts the attention of a local charmer in a scorpion bolo tie, Harvey Keitel’s Ben, who seems sweet until he’s not. When his violent streak emerges, Alice and Tommy pack up and flee to Tucson, where Alice takes a waitressing job. Workaday stuff rankles her—she doesn’t get along with one of her new coworkers, Diane Ladd’s delightfully potty-mouthed Flo, though the two bond once they realize that, as women on their own, they have more in common than they thought. And the café brings Alice a new love interest, an easygoing divorcé named David (played by Kris Kristofferson, whose honeyed drawl is as reassuring as his crinkle-eyed smile). David may be a dream come true—or he may simply be the charming bulldozer that nudges another dream out of the picture.

Though Alice’s world is miles away from the scruffy universe of Mean Streets, Scorsese’s fingerprints are all over the film, in the casually unvarnished texture of its dialogue, in the way he navigates a sudden tone shift by training a handheld camera on Ben as he flies into a potentially murderous rage. Even so, he’s always attuned to Burstyn’s sturdy radiance. Her performance has a complex, gentle authority, keyed to one central truth: you’ve got to have a sense of humor to get through life. Alice’s husband certainly didn’t. Flo definitely does. And for Alice and Tommy, cracking wise is simply a way of being. As new characters flow around them and into their story, the tapestry of their life together gently shifts in tone and color. Jodie Foster shows up as a smart, sassy tomboy who encourages Tommy to shoplift; Vic Tayback is Mel, the café’s owner, who runs a tight ship even as he delights in his employees’ idiosyncrasies, including those of the space-case waitress Vera, played by Valerie Curtin. All of these people represent, for Alice and Tommy, a life that’s nothing like their old one—a better, freer mode of being.

Audiences, and plenty of critics, loved the film. Both Ladd and Getchell were nominated for Academy Awards, and Burstyn won for Best Actress. It seemed viewers didn’t want to leave these characters behind: the movie inspired the long-running CBS sitcom Alice, with Linda Lavin in the starring role (Burstyn at the time wasn’t interested in doing television) and Tayback reprising his role as Mel. All of that sprang from the world Scorsese created for the character of Alice, and from Burstyn’s portrayal of her. It’s easy to claim that male filmmakers can’t really key into women’s experiences. But Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore shows what can happen when a director and a star listen to one another and build upon each other’s ideas. This is one of the unshowiest of Scorsese’s films; it’s also one of his most tender pictures, freewheeling in its easy warmth.

Some viewers and critics, Pauline Kael among the latter, enjoyed the film but were disappointed by what the ending suggests: that finding a man is central to Alice’s happiness. But Alice has never had a good man, which Kristofferson’s David seems to be. Until the seventies, many women had been trained to seek a provider rather than a simpatico life partner. In 1974, David represented something many women didn’t even know they wanted. Shouldn’t Alice be allowed to take a chance on what could be a great relationship?

To look at Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore through a rigid feminist lens also fails to reckon with the scope of Burstyn’s performance. She’s lit from within but also guarded, like cautious sunlight. And the wary hopefulness on Alice’s face, on Burstyn’s face, as she stands in the doorway of that first motel room, wearing that okay-but-not-great dress, tells you everything about what it takes to bounce back from a fall. Women don’t always restart their lives with radical makeovers. Sometimes it all starts with a polka-dot scarf.

The final scene, in which Alice and Tommy walk along a street in Tucson toward a mildly shabby roadside sign that happens to spell out, in big letters, Monterey—a sign that, according to Scorsese, just popped up, unplanned, in the shot—is perfect. Alice puts her arm around Tommy and squeezes a little too hard; he protests—this was an improvisation, too, from Lutter. More important than ideology is to trust what actors, in this case Burstyn and Lutter, are telling you. Alice and Tommy are walking toward a future of their own making, a Monterey by any other name. It’s their path to chart, and their dream to follow.

Miramax’s marketing campaign leaned heavily into the idea that the film contained a taboo twist having to do with sexuality and gender. That tactic proved to be massively successful with the moviegoing public, and the film went on to earn $71 million. The trailer featured cautionary and clichéd warnings of the kind endemic to any thriller of the era, and the glamorous Black trans woman Dil (Jaye Davidson) made her first appearance there alongside the phrase “Where nothing is what it seems to be.”

Even so, there’s not a moment from the marketing, or from the public discourse around it, that can be isolated as the one that immortalized The Crying Game as the film epitomizing the reveal trope; it was a constellation of voices and events that did that. Critic Roger Ebert lavished praise on the film in his December 1992 review but compared it with 1960’s Psycho, a horror movie that makes the disclosure of its serial killer’s gender ambiguity a key component of its terrifying climax, writing that The Crying Game presented itself as one thing but really was “about something else altogether.” At the sixty-fifth Oscars the following March, The Crying Game was nominated for six awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Davidson, and the cultural hysteria surrounding the reveal supplied a centerpiece of host Billy Crystal’s opening monologue. The number he performed was a supposedly comedic twist on the trans-panic reaction. Called “(Surprise) It’s The Crying Game,” the song was written by gay comedian Bruce Vilanch and set to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “(Love Is) The Tender Trap.” In the audience, Davidson reacted with a stone-faced expression to Crystal’s trivialization of the film. In subsequent years, the reveal was spoofed in several other movies, but none more notorious than Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (1994), when the antagonist, Lieutenant Lois Einhorn (Sean Young), is shown, with a crass close-up of her tucked groin area, to be disgraced Miami Dolphins placekicker Ray Finkle, against a needle drop from The Crying Game’s soundtrack and alongside a montage of police officers gagging.

It is hardly the fault of The Crying Game that the American public didn’t know how to respond to the difficult questions about the fluidity of sexuality and gender that the film was raising. American audiences at the time were prone to disorientation whenever the possibility of transness was introduced. They’d also struggled with the ambiguity of serial killer Jame Gumb’s nature in the Academy Award–winning The Silence of the Lambs (1991), whose infamous tucking scene—which was also endlessly spoofed—is likely the most notorious trans film image of the twentieth century. It would be difficult to blame any trans person who considers either of these films an impassable obstacle owing to the cultural residue of its contemporary reception and its reputation. However, when looking at The Crying Game with some distance from the monocultural freak-out, it is clear that we did not have the language to explain its virtues in the 1990s.

The white IRA volunteer Fergus (Stephen Rea) and the captured Black British soldier Jody (Forest Whitaker), whom he is supposed to be guarding, have an intimate chemistry that neither explicitly acknowledges. Their flirtation extends to their bond over the types of women they find beautiful. Jody alludes to the fact that he’s attracted to trans women when he says that the IRA member Jude (Miranda Richardson) isn’t his type. Fergus is enamored by the picture of Jody’s girlfriend, Dil, that he keeps in his wallet, and tells him that Dil would be anyone’s type. Over the course of an evening, they tell childhood stories and make promises of deep friendship if they can survive the moment. With the hour of Jody’s planned assassination nearing, Fergus agrees to his request that he seek out Dil and tell her what happened.

We catch up with Fergus—now going by Jimmy—in his new life in London, where he is finding Dil just as intoxicating as he found Jody. His sexuality is as mystifying as her gender identity; binary thinking does us no favors when it comes to characters as elastic as these. The romantic tension of The Crying Game arises not only from the question of whether Fergus can love a trans woman but also from his own reconciliation with the interracial queer relationships he finds himself drawn toward.

Also on October 30, 1992, The Crying Game, the new movie from Irish screenwriter, director, and author Neil Jordan, opened in UK theaters. It was a malign concurrence, if not exactly an unlikely one given how active the IRA was that month, that attacks occurred alongside the release of a film exploring the emotional complexities of an IRA member, portrayed with sympathetic sensitivity by Irish actor Stephen Rea. While the movie would be an immediate sensation when Miramax put it out in America a month later, its reception in the UK was more muted.

“I can understand why, when it was released in Britain, it didn’t take off like a rocket,” Jordan said at a twenty-fifth-anniversary screening. “It was still a very disturbing fact, you know, the fact of political violence. The memories of Bloody Birmingham and IRA bombs and all that were still very raw. And the idea of accepting a character like the character [Rea] played, seeing a human being there, was offensive—not only to English people, to a lot of Irish people as well.”

The humanization of an IRA soldier had also alarmed financial backers, whose reluctance nearly torpedoed the independent production. Jordan eventually started shooting without having the money to finish, and wound up “begging” for funding to complete the movie. (He got it from Britain’s Channel 4, on the condition he shoot a contrived, conventional happily-ever-after ending. He did, but he hated it, and ultimately lobbied successfully for his original finale.) Potential producers objected to The Crying Game’s political elements, its central interracial relationship, and its provocative take on sexuality, gender fluidity, and queerness. They were particularly uncomfortable with the midfilm twist, which took the movie out of the familiar arena of heterosexual, status-quo-confirming movie romances.

Inevitably, though, those were the exact same elements that critics and viewers couldn’t stop discussing, particularly after Miramax cleverly marketed the movie around the idea of a big secret no one should spoil. Miramax directly contacted individual critics ahead of the film’s premiere at the 1992 Venice Film Festival, asking them not to spoil the big twist—and all but guaranteeing that reviews would focus enticingly on The Crying Game as a movie with an important, daring reveal that audiences had to experience for themselves.

That startling moment of revelation, the scene where all the foreshadowing falls into focus, also made for irresistible word of mouth once the film hit theaters. But The Crying Game’s longevity runs much deeper than the twist. Every relationship in this film is adrift in confusion, emotion, and denial, from the connections the characters share to their individual relationships with institutions, nations, gender, race, class, and even their own identities. That’s what really makes Jordan’s movie so endlessly discussable.

Rea stars as Fergus, an IRA volunteer who helps kidnap a British soldier, Jody (American actor Forest Whitaker), as a potential bargaining chip for a hostage exchange. Over the course of three days in a rural Northern Ireland hideout, Fergus guards Jody for the IRA, and the two men build up a rough camaraderie. Whether out of authentic longing, spite, or some combination of motives, Jody boasts about his girlfriend, Dil, and urges Fergus to visit her in London and comfort her if Jody dies. When the British Army comes to rescue Jody and, ironically, accidentally kills him, Fergus flees and lands in London under an assumed identity. He does seek out Dil, a glamorous, flirtatious hairdresser. (Fashion model and first-time film actor Jaye Davidson has claimed he took the part out of a belief that the film would be a direct-to-video flop, leaving him relatively anonymous. Instead, it was an international hit, and Davidson went on to a major role in 1994’s Stargate before largely retiring from acting.)

Fergus rapidly falls for Dil, not realizing she’s a trans woman. When he first sees her naked, he’s shocked and revolted—but he can’t stay away from her, especially when his old IRA cadre, particularly his venomous former lover Jude (Miranda Richardson), finds him and threatens Dil’s life if Fergus doesn’t agree to a suicidal attack on a British judge.

Jordan’s intent was not to valorize the IRA or destigmatize its attacks. That may not have been clear to 1992 audiences reading about the movie’s portrayal of Fergus. (“An Irish Terrorist in Human Terms,” proclaimed the headline on Vincent Canby’s New York Times review.) But it’s clear enough to anyone who watches the film and sees how brutish, impulsive, indifferent, or cruel Fergus’s compatriots are, and how he fully finds himself only after he leaves them behind and takes up with Dil. Fergus and Dil’s relationship is messy—mutually confusing and mutually painful. But it’s part of a necessary reconstruction and reclamation process for both of them, a way to redefine themselves in more positive terms.

Any analysis of Jordan’s work is likely to eventually become an analysis of identity. At some point, his stories almost invariably consider who his characters are versus who (or what) they’re pretending to be. Supernatural predators disguise themselves as ordinary humans in The Company of Wolves (1984), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and Byzantium (2012). Con artists masquerade as ghosts in High Spirits (1988), convicts masquerade as priests in We’re No Angels (1989), and a drug mule identifies as a selkie in Ondine (2009). Michael Collins finds his political identity in Michael Collins (1996), and Kitty grows into her trans identity in Breakfast on Pluto (2005), while Francie Brady loses his identity to fantasy, trauma, and madness in The Butcher Boy (1997). The characters in 1986’s Mona Lisa adopt false names, wear disguises, and steal one another’s identities. The eponymous villain of 2018’s Greta is a matryoshka of assumed personae, stacked one inside another.

In The Crying Game, Dil projects confidence and control. In the Metro, the run-down but cozy corner pub where Jody told Fergus he would find Dil, she holds herself like temporarily embarrassed royalty, graciously accepting fealty from her court, particularly the ever-watchful, gently supportive bartender Col (Jim Broadbent). But her loneliness and hunger for acceptance, love, and kindness leave her vulnerable, first to an abusive hanger-on, Dave (Ralph Brown), who manhandles and hits her whenever she refuses his advances, then to Fergus himself. She sees Fergus as a chance to reshape her life, to see herself anew through the eyes of a shy, admiring, gallant stranger. When Fergus assaults Dave, Dil clearly relishes the power to finally chase off her abuser and have it stick. But she also enjoys being protected by someone who cares enough about her to feel possessive and jealous.

Fergus’s own identity games are more complicated. Jordan has said that, for him, the hook in The Crying Game was the chance to dissect his protagonist, to separate him from his self-image and see what happened next. Fergus starts out as an IRA loyalist, but his sympathy for the charismatic, sly, subversively funny Jody shakes his ability to demonize British soldiers. Jody, a Black British man of Caribbean descent, confronts Fergus with accounts of the shocking racism he has experienced in Ireland, making Fergus uncomfortable with his own ethnic identity. For her part, Dil rattles Fergus’s sense of his sexuality, while Jude shatters his sense of agency and independence.

“By the end of the movie, he’s called every facet of what he thought he was into question,” Jordan told the British Film Institute in 2017. “I don’t think people fully understand themselves, and I like to make movies about characters who realize they don’t fully understand themselves.”

Fergus responds to his initial losses of identity by remaking himself in London: he cuts off his shaggy hair, takes the name Jimmy, allows Dil to believe he’s Scottish, and conceals his history with Jody from her for most of the film. He has the nerve to accuse Dil of adopting a false identity (“You’re not a girl,” he tells her, with a patronizing air), even as he’s lying to her about who he is, where he’s from, and why he sought her out. But there’s an open question hanging over The Crying Game: Who was Fergus, really, before he met Jody? We learn nothing about his family, his history, or what brought him to the IRA. His entire defense of the organization’s terrorist acts amounts to one limp sentence delivered to Jody: “You guys shouldn’t be here.”

The only hints we have about his life come from the bits and bobs Jody elicits over three days of dialogue: Fergus is a fan of hurling, he enjoys “having a pint at the Rock,” and he knows a little about the Bible. The real keys to him are that he’s instinctively kind to Jody, and that when Jody shames him for having no words of comfort about Jody’s impending execution, Fergus meekly responds, “No, I’m not good for much.”

When Jordan was developing the movie, one seminal text he drew on was 1931’s “Guests of the Nation,” the most traveled short story by celebrated Irish author and cultural writer Frank O’Connor. The first-person narrative concerns an IRA soldier, nicknamed Bonaparte, whose cadre has been holding two English soldiers hostage for so long, and so informally, that captives and captors alike have lost their innate sense of enmity. They aren’t friends, exactly, but they’re as familiar with each other as small-town neighbors, and their arguments about society, capitalism, and God are contentious but not vituperative.

Then Bonaparte’s group is ordered to execute their captives, in retaliation for IRA members killed by the British Army. None of the men entirely know how to proceed, and the murders that follow are marked more by social awkwardness than nationalistic fervor. After helping to bury the two English soldiers, Bonaparte describes the terrible distance he feels from everyone and everything around him. “I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow,” he says. “And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about again.” That’s where the first act of The Crying Game leaves Fergus—guilt-stricken, vulnerable, bereft, and primed for reconstruction. But he lacks the will or impetus to reshape himself past the most basic surface elements (a haircut, a name, a day-laborer job) until he meets Dil.

For all Dil’s aching need for love and validation, she’s more certain in her identity than Fergus is in his. She has carved out a precise life for herself in places where she’s welcomed and accepted—a salon where she’s just one of the girls, a quiet neighborhood queer bar where she sits shoulder to shoulder with people playing with masculinity or femininity in rule-breaking, constructed ways. “Dil” as a persona is something of a public performance—she periodically speaks about herself in the third person, just as Jody did about himself in the movie’s opening. (The commonality raises the question of whether one of them picked this habit up from the other, or whether perhaps it was a shared game.) She uses that affectation to distance herself from some of the flirty or furious emotions she communicates to Fergus, pointedly passing her messages through Col at the Metro, even when she and Fergus are sitting together.

Other parts of her identity she expresses through a song. Her smoky, sultry cover of Dave Berry’s lyrically banal but effectively melancholy pop song “The Crying Game,” performed on the Metro’s stage for an appreciative audience, communicates how love has let her down in the past, and how she’s still getting by. (In a wink at the movie’s central toying with gender constructs, pioneering gender-fluid singer Boy George covers the song over the closing credits.)

But while Dil’s various performances—of the song, of imperious amusement at Fergus, of chic glamour and absolute confidence—hide the hungers that drive her, she ultimately proves so desperate for Fergus’s approval that she tearfully permits him to strip away her identity toward the climax of the movie. When he cuts off her hair and dresses her in Jody’s clothes, he claims he’s trying to protect her from his IRA pursuers by disguising her. Instead, he winds up symbolically recreating Jody to replace the one he watched die. Ultimately, this facsimile of Jody avenges the original Jody, successfully fighting back against Jude (who has also reinvented herself, with new hair, clothes, and bitter hardness) and Fergus in ways the first Jody couldn’t.

Even Fergus winds up mirroring Jody: In the film’s opening act, Jody tells him the old fable about the scorpion who wants a frog to carry him across a body of water but can’t stop himself from stinging the frog midtrip, dooming them both. “I can’t help it,” the scorpion says. “It’s in my nature.” In the film’s final moments, Fergus, in prison after taking the blame for killing Jude, tells the same story to Dil, by way of explaining why he had to give up his freedom for hers: with all his other pretensions and disguises stripped away, he implies, doing the right thing is in his nature.

None of this shows the IRA in a positive light, and none of it digs into the generational complexities of Irish politics in a way that aims to justify or excuse the bombs that were going off as The Crying Game opened in theaters. British audiences resisted the film without necessarily seeing how it interrogates the IRA, its methods, and its members while symbolically rescuing at least one of them, putting him back on the road toward empathy and human connection. It’s much more a personal movie than a political one, a continuation of Jordan’s still-ongoing explorations of how his sectarian, contentious, frequently violent homeland constructs some people’s identities, and shatters others’. In The Crying Game, he ultimately asks which parts of identity are important enough to kill for or die for, and which we can let go, for love or friendship or basic humanity. Whatever’s hidden under all the things we imagine to be our true identities, he implies, is in our natures. We can only hope the kindness in those natures outweighs the cruelty.

One of the most mischievous figures in world cinema, Věra Chytilová is still best known for Daisies, the daring 1966 film whose gonzo vision of female rebellion and empowerment launched her into the public eye. This Czechoslovak New Wave landmark—which follows the hedonistic exploits of two young women, both named Marie—was banned in the director’s home country for its many shots of wasted food, at a time when rations were strictly enforced by the communist government. Beyond the popularity of this signature work, though, there’s much left to discover in Chytilová’s oeuvre—including the underappreciated Wolf’s Hole, made two decades later. This grim but kooky take on the teen-horror genre widens the scope of Chytilová’s political critique; instead of taking exclusive aim at the patriarchy, here she examines the power dynamics within a group of adolescents from different backgrounds who have been invited to a mysterious skiing retreat that turns out to be a dangerous game. Though the movie lightly touches on gender politics, its main subject is the absurdity of authoritarianism and groupthink.

In contrast to Chytilová’s other films, which tend to be formally subversive and experimental, Wolf’s Hole has a relatively straightforward narrative premise: once the ragtag group of eleven youths arrive at their cabin at the top of an icy mountain, they begin to discover that their three adult leaders aren’t who they claim to be. At first, the warning signs are subtle, but the kids soon learn that they are being held captive by aliens. The leader, who calls himself “Daddy,” explains to the hostages that there should be only ten of them at the retreat, and refuses to let them leave until they have chosen one of their own to be killed. Daddy’s intention is to reveal the mercenary nature of the human species, and the ensuing power struggle forms the central drama. Will the group decide on an ethnic outsider, a Romani girl named Gitka, who has brought along a pesky dog and attends a different school than the others? Or will they single out the defiant Petr, who has a criminal past?

Wolf’s Hole takes time integrating its various dystopian genre elements. The warbling synths on the eerie, blippy soundtrack call to mind the film scores of John Carpenter (just as the plot may remind viewers of Carpenter’s similarly icebound and extraterrestrial-themed The Thing). Equally hypnotic are Chytilová’s images, which include long shots of crackling snow, indigo nights, and blizzard-struck slopes. Unlike its American counterparts in the teen-horror genre, Wolf’s Hole contains no blood or sex; the most rebellious thing about the kids, initially, is their smoking habit, which is thwarted when their matches are confiscated. Considering its dreary, remote setting and the physical constraints that the characters are trying to escape, it’s remarkable how many tonal registers the film contains: Chytilová’s satirical humor turns on a dime, from understated to fiery. She gives us a hodgepodge of moods, ideas, and vibes, with a visual sensibility that never lets us get our bearings.

It wasn’t until 2012 that I met Love in real life. I was cohosting a live-stream radio show during Fashion Week, put on by Garage magazine. My cohost and best friend, Sara Nataf, and I were not told who the guest was going to be until we arrived to get set up. That morning, I happened to have put on my favorite Hole T-shirt (the one with the pink and green splatter logo), and I guess you could say I had done so unknowingly, though I believe some part of me knew what was about to happen. Love was the star we were talking to that day, and we had a wonderful interview. To the shock and awe of that unibrowed twelve-year-old still inside me, we struck up a friendship.

I think the reasons that I (and others like me, including many women and gay men) feel that Love opened the world up to us are the same qualities that make her a great actress. She has a rare combination of electric charisma, razor-sharp intelligence, and profound vulnerability that blasts off the screen. But she’s also uncompromising, honest, and extraordinarily self-aware, characteristics that do not thrive in Hollywood.

Love has appeared in less than a dozen films, both before and after she rose to fame (and infamy) with her high-profile marriage to Kurt Cobain and her music. Most would agree that the high point of her acting career is Miloš Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. In his review, Roger Ebert called her “a true actress,” which she always was.

In a just world, we would have gotten the opportunity to see her play a range of complicated, interesting characters (including romantic-comedy leads! See: her performance in 200 Cigarettes). We don’t live in that world, but we can be grateful for everything she has shared with us so far: her music (of which there is more on the way), wisdom, unforgettable looks, endlessly quotable sound bites, and the six films of hers now playing on the Criterion Channel, all of which are worth watching.

You had a small acting career prior to your success in music. Many people might not be aware that, in the mid-’80s, you collaborated with the experimental director George Kuchar, and even appeared in one of his short films, Club Vatican (1984). And you also took some classes taught by Whoopi Goldberg! What came first—the desire to play music or the desire to act?

Yeah, I had a really small acting career. I went to San Francisco Art Institute very, very briefly, and it was pass/fail. I only went for a minute. Maybe a semester? People were really pursuing fine art, and I couldn’t relate to it at all. I met George Kuchar; he was just a great San Francisco eccentric, you know, a Wavy Gravy type. And he was like, “I make films.” It was very much out of this scene in San Francisco, [centered around the nightclub] the Mabuhay Gardens, also known as the Fab Mab, and all these very performance-y, ’70s punk and prepunk bands like the Mutants. [The bands] were all sort of in his films, and they were wacky. I had always wanted to be in films. So . . . I’m in a few George Kuchar films, being insane. I didn’t really study film, but I was in his films.

 

My friend Kay Moore was going out to Oakland. She was a comedian and taking comedy lessons from this woman, Whoopi. And so we went a few times. You just sort of sat there, and she was so brilliant and clearly was going to do great things in her life.

You were cast in a small role in your first feature film, playing Gretchen in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy, in 1985, and then in a leading role, as Velma in his 1987 film Straight to Hell. What did you learn from being directed by him?

So there was an ad in this punk zine called Flipside. I was like a little San Francisco street rat, and my drug dealer pointed out that there was an ad in there for an open call for Sid and Nancy, down at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, for the role of Nancy Spungen, who I’ve come to be very protective of. [My drug dealer] paid for my midnight flight—twenty-five dollars, San Francisco to LA, one-way. I stayed with my friend Jennifer Finch.

 

There were a lot of girls there. Abbe Wool had written a script with Alex Cox. I memorized so much more of that than you were supposed to, because I didn’t know the process. There were a lot of girls with Harrods bags because there’s a scene with one in it. I’d gone to England, and I’d even lived in Liverpool and a bit in London, and I knew what Harrods was, but I didn’t have a Harrods bag. And I was really intimidated by that. There were a lot of LA rich girls who could afford wigs and Harrods bags. Now everybody that acts is a rich girl! Acting was more of a working-class game back then.

 

So I read for it, and I was impressive to Alex Cox, and to the room. Gary Oldman tried out, and so did Daniel Day-Lewis, and neither had done a film before. Daniel Day-Lewis got My Beautiful Laundrette like five minutes after this; they were both gonna explode. I remember hearing that Abbe Wool and Alex were really stumping for me. But I was eighteen, and these guys were twenty-seven. So, you know, it was pretty clear that I’m not gonna play this titular Nancy role, and I’m very, very happy that I didn’t.

 

First of all, it was Roger Deakins’s first film. They let me do a lot of stuff! They let me cast extras, help the art department with shit. I remember going up to Roger and being like, hey, can I help you with camera work? [Laughs.] I looked through a big Panavision, and I saw black and was like, that wasn’t for me.

 

I remember complaining to [producer] Eric Fellner and Alex Cox: “You know, Gretchen was a real person. She was Johnny Thunders’s girlfriend, and she doesn’t say enough. What about Gretchen? Justice for Gretchen!”

 

I’d never been to New York; I’d never been paid $365 a day. A while passed, and Alex Cox called me, and he was like, we wrote you a role [as Velma in Straight to Hell]. I was back in San Francisco, I was dancing, and I was super excited.

How was Joe Strummer as a costar?

Here’s the thing about Joe Strummer: I didn’t have a sense of how really, truly important the Clash was. I didn’t have the sense that they had really affected politics in Britain or anything like that. My friend Julie was like, I made out with Joe Strummer once. How could you not think he was sexy? I thought he was like my uncle, okay? I was a kid. They were so nice to me. I was playing a pregnant woman in Almeria, Spain, at MiniHollywood [a Wild West–style theme park]. It was really fucking hot, and it was really fucking cheap, and I was wearing this belly, and I would pick the Styrofoam out of the belly so I would look thinner.

 

I was playing a really bad guitar with nylon strings. I was just trying to form chords with my fingers, no pick. Remember, I wasn’t intimidated by Joe. I didn’t know to be. So he got in the back of the car and he was like, you’re a really bad guitar player. Don’t quit your day job. And I was like, fuck you. And we really made friends. I ended up living in his basement at some point for quite some time. It was great. For a couple of years, we were really tight.

Was Dick Rude as hot in person as I found him to be when I watched this film as a teenager?

Dick Rude was really hot. That movie was ridiculous. It was so funny and ridiculous. Alex Cox was so good to me. He was like a dress rehearsal for Miloš [Forman]. I don’t want to say [it was] paternal, because it’s something past paternal. When a director really loves you for you, you can do no fucking wrong. He’ll tease it out of you, and you just look up to him hugely.

 

We used to sleep under the stars on the roof instead of going to the hotel. Me and Joe and Dick Rude and Alex.

In Basquiat, you play a character known only as Big Pink, speculated to be based on Madonna and/or Debbie Harry. Were you aware of that potential connection when you were playing the role, and if so, did you use any aspects of either of those women in your performance? Did you have a relationship to Basquiat’s work prior to being cast in the film?

No, I didn’t have any sense of him. I’m uncultured, remember that. I come from the streets of San Francisco. However, it was a cool set, and I like Jeffrey [Wright], and we had this little scene. I found out later that I was representing Madonna, and I was mad about it. I’m not mad anymore at all, but I’ve never seen that movie.

Your performance in The People vs. Larry Flynt was undeniably exceptional and largely critically celebrated. However, some people tried to criticize it by claiming you were only playing yourself. Miloš Forman told Rolling Stone that actually perhaps the Courtney Love of the early ’90s in media was less you than people thought—“Courtney explained to me that she’s always very much under the pressure of the music people to play, to act, this character who is on the edge, because that’s what sells records and that’s what brings the kids into her concerts.” What was it like working with him, and how aware were you of his work?

Obviously I knew who Miloš was. I’m not that dumb. You know why? Lots of reasons, but in San Francisco at the Strand, me and my friend Marie Barr would go and see Amadeus every day. When I liked a movie, I used to go see it at the theater every day. But the first time I went to see Miloš, there were a lot of actresses going in and out. I remember seeing Ashley Judd there, and a lot of the ladies of the day. And he was watching a Lakers game and smoking his cigar. He was kind of a dick. I was like, okay, whatever, I’m not getting this role. He liked that I was kind of a dick back to his dick, and I got called back again, and then I read with Woody [Harrelson], and I got called back again.

 

After I did this audition, I was taken to the old Palm Restaurant, with Woody; Miloš; Oliver Stone, who was a producer on it; and some studio executives like Mark Canton, who, I found out later, had said, over my dead body are you casting this girl. I blurted out, to this table full of mostly producers, “Do you know, when I was a kid, and I was a ward of the state… I was on the same compound you shot One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest in.”

 

Miloš took me aside, and in his deep Czech accent, he goes, listen, these people, they only like the upper-middle class. Do you have anything upper-middle-class? And I said, boarding school. And he went, yes, boarding school. And then he goes, did you ever ride a pony? And I said, yeah, I took riding lessons. So he goes, don’t say anything. I don’t care if you were a crack whore on the street. Don’t say it. I adjusted accordingly. We had an incredible working relationship. Woody was nothing but great to me. We had one epic fight that was crazy.

 

Edward Norton had been cast. He’d just come off Primal Fear, and he’d done a Woody Allen movie. We started hanging out, and we would rehearse. One day I came to set and Miloš was so furious. He’s like, I don’t ever want to see you act. If I see you acting, you can’t hang out with Edward anymore.

What drew you to the part of Joan Volmer, William Burroughs’s wife, in Beat? I’ve always been fascinated by her and how history has flattened her into a biographical point in his artistic development arc when she was clearly a brilliant and fascinating person. Did you feel the same way about her before you took the part?

[After The People vs. Larry Flynt] I did Man on the Moon, and then I just started getting offered everything. Everything. I hate when people do their pass list; it’s such a simpy thing to do. So I won’t even bore you.

 

I’d been in Hollywood for years. And you would think I knew how to play that game. I just didn’t. I liked being a film star, it was super fun. I just was under a lot of pressure.

 

I kept passing on things that ended up getting Academy Awards or making a billion dollars or whatever. I will say one thing, because no one's ever made it. Sherry Lansing brought me in when she was the head of Paramount. She said, how about you do Janis Joplin? She did this whole pitch. Sherry Lansing was an incredibly formidable beauty queen, you know, velvet glove with the iron fist. And I said, I don't want to do it. I want to do [James Gray’s] The Yards. And Sherry Lansing blew up. She was offering me fifteen million. Like, this was the era where actors were getting twenty. I was friends with Drew Barrymore, and she’s like, do it for the quote. I would never do anything for the quote at that point. I’d just come from punk, and like, you don't do things for money. Anyway, I told her I didn’t want to do Janis and I wanted to do The Yards. And she was like, you want to fucking do The Yards with Harvey [Weinstein]? It was very funny.

 

Anyway, I didn’t want to do Joplin. I wanted do this little movie, Beat, because I had a real connection to these Beat guys. Also, Joan Vollmer Burroughs was murdered. And that to me was a better story. I just felt like, okay, that’s something I can get into. It was a really hard shoot in Mexico. Kiefer Sutherland was William Burroughs. My friend Norman Reedus was Lucien [Carr]. I really enjoyed it. It was kind of a film on my own terms, where I got to sort of do what I wanted. Lots of things didn’t work in it, but it’s a really reflective, interesting piece that didn’t get any attention. So I’m glad Criterion is showing it, because of everybody’s performances—they’re all great.

You’re so good, and incredibly charming and funny, in 200 Cigarettes, in what is essentially a romantic-comedy role. Did you ever want to do more comedic roles?

200 Cigarettes was [directed by] Risa Bramon Garcia. If you know anything, you know that she and her partner were, other than Bonnie Zimmerman, the biggest casting agents in Hollywood. The thing I liked about it, weirdly, was she’d never cast me. I owed her nothing. A lot of people on that film owed her something. Her [producing] partner, Betsy [Beers], was a really great comedic woman. It was so light and so sweet. I was like, I wanna do this movie because it’s comedy.

 

I remember the producer wanted somebody else to play the person across me. I had just seen Clueless, and there’s a scene in Clueless where Alicia Silverstone [as Cher] says, “Well, I know my Mel Gibson,” about Hamlet, and [Paul Rudd] just gives her a look. I told Risa and Betsy, I wanna do this with Paul Rudd. I had casting approval, which is a weird thing. I remember being accosted at a party by Billy Zane, yelling at me because I had casting approval. Anyway, I didn't care, I just wanted Paul Rudd. So I had to send him flowers. I did a whole campaign, and he said yes in the end. We had a really good time.

 

Comedy is really fucking hard. I had done Man on the Moon. I’d been around Jim Carrey, and we had talked about it a lot, physical comedy, and he did some comic stuff in that movie. The milk and cookies in the Carnegie Hall scene was fucking epic. The process of comedy was really hard. Honestly, if you have a good leading partner, everything is butter. And that cast was great: Kate Hudson coming off her first indie; Christina Ricci; Elvis Costello, my scene partner in life. Who else? A lot of people in that fucking movie. Casey Affleck! It was crazy. Janeane Garofalo and Ben Affleck. It was a great set. It was really fun; great camaraderie. And Risa was a really good director. Betsy was the producer. They were a great team.

 

I wish I had done more comedies.

Trapped was one of the last feature films you did. Did you seek out a role in a crime thriller, something you hadn’t really done before? Is it a genre you like in general? Did you enjoy stretching yourself for that?

Trapped was sort of like me knowing, okay, I need to get my shit together and do a real movie. Charlize [Theron] was on the come up. Also, Kevin Bacon was in it. I could now play the Kevin Bacon game and actually be not even one degree from Kevin Bacon.

 

I know why I did that movie—[the director] Luis Mandoki. I asked Jennifer Lopez; I asked Andy Garcia. I asked people that had been in Luis Mandoki movies because I didn’t want to make the same mistake and not have a really good connection with my director ever again. Luis was fantastic, and he got the best reports from other actors. I do think Jennifer Lopez is such a good actress. I love her. Hustlers should have gotten an Oscar nomination if not an Oscar. I talked briefly to Meg Ryan, and everybody said he was great, and he was. I just wanna say, Vancouver is hard if you’re an actor, it just is. It grates on the soul.

What are some of your unrealized artistic ambitions when it comes to acting and filmmaking? Do you think you’ll act again?

I had a really brief run. I did things wrong. I just didn’t know how to do things. As far as my film life, I don't really care. I peaced out and that was the end of me in that world. My friend Courtney Hoffman, who’s a director, was like, you need to go to AFI women’s program to direct. This was ten years ago. I told Aaron Sorkin about this. I told Cameron Crowe, because you have to get someone to recommend you. It was like literally the whole town going, oh, we know what to do with Courtney now. She should direct. And I thought the same thing. I went into AFI, and these women were great. There’s only so many places a year, and it’s an eighteen-month program. Have you ever gone on a date and it was high stakes, but you both knew it was not for you? I don’t want to direct. I don’t want to write. The Courtney-can-direct thing? No, not gonna happen. Courtney can write a really good album. That’s what Courtney’s doing right now. I’m super flattered, with my brief run, that Criterion is doing anything. What the fuck? It’s amazing. I’m so grateful.

A socially engaged film with a political topic, It Was Just an Accident (2025) is Panahi’s eleventh feature, and his sixth made clandestinely in Iran. It’s based on his two experiences as a prisoner of conscience in Iran, in 2010 and 2022–23, which included solitary confinement, hunger strikes, and interrogation sessions. The film was shot in just twenty-five days, following the end of a twenty-year sentence that banned the director from filmmaking, writing, giving interviews, and traveling abroad. Still, Panahi adamantly identifies as a socially engaged filmmaker, not a political one. In authoritarian states, which benefit from blurring the boundaries between the social and the political as a form of control over plurality and dissent, artists tend to emphasize the distinction between the two, seeking to lay claim to their civil rights without being accused of political radicalism. Both this civilian tendency to detach the social from the political and the state’s attempts to conflate them are symptomatic of the power imbalances found in corrupt justice systems and collapsing legal and social orders. In a sense, this film is taking part in a tradition of cinema—from Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, and Asghar Farhadi’s The Salesman—that depicts individual efforts to correct such power imbalances as vigilantism. Unlike most revenge thrillers, however, including Panahi’s own Crimson Gold (2003), It Was Just an Accident is also about the vigilante’s search for a way to settle with their doubt.

What does a group of torture victims do when they think they may have encountered their torturer outside prison? This central question of It Was Just an Accident is reminiscent of ones asked by other artists with lived experiences of authoritarianism, dictatorship, and repression—the Turkish playwright Tuncer Cücenoğlu, for example, in his 1980 Dead End, or the Argentina-born Chilean American playwright Ariel Dorfman in his 1990 Death and the Maiden. What sets Panahi’s film apart is that its dilemma extends beyond individual choices to encompass the communal decisions that must be made by conflicting voices—voices that often share a goal but not modalities. Some discover that their goal changes as they evaluate the means of reaching it.

“I dig for the truth, but while I do, something happens to it,” says the Writer in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. “He took everything: my dignity, my wife, my job. I lost everything. I even dug a hole to bury him alive. But he made me doubt,” says It Was Just an Accident’s former prisoner of conscience Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) of his interrogator and torturer Eqbal (Ebrahim Azizi). Vahid’s mentor, Salar (Georges Hashemzadeh), responds: “There’s no need to dig their graves. They’ve done it themselves. It’s your ideals you’d be burying.” Vahid must process not only what to do with his torturer but also what his ideals are and how to act on them with the freedom of a new beginning.

In the incident that sets the film’s plot in motion, Vahid, an Azeri-speaking mechanic, believes he has encountered Eqbal in the garage where he works, based on the distinctive squeaking of the man’s prosthetic leg (Vahid was always blindfolded during interrogations). He kidnaps Eqbal, intending to exact his revenge, but after some interaction is uncertain whether he has the right person and seeks to confirm the identification by consulting with several fellow victims—introducing the unpredictable variety of their opinions and styles. With each of the six characters who ultimately join Vahid in his van over the course of the film, a different layer of absurdist comedy is added to its social satire. Without overt genre stylization, a philosophical examination of political ethics transforms into a comedy of manners before a final tonal shift into a psychological thriller, with an ending that keeps us oscillating between hope and despair, life and death. Some of the film’s sarcasm and humor is lost in cultural and linguistic translation, such as the riotous language of the hot-tempered Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr), as well as aspects of Elyasmehr’s phenomenal performance. Yet the experience of seeing the film in a movie theater is a communal one of confronting fear and uncertainty and processing collective trauma through laughter. In an emotionally charged sequence, Vahid begins burying the blindfolded Eqbal alive while Eqbal implores him to stop and swears he is not the torturer. In a moment of doubt, after seeing the fresh wounds on the man’s amputated leg, Vahid stops and lights a cigarette. Traveling with Panahi, I learned by experience that, in North America, the cut from Vahid in the grave to Vahid smoking while sitting ambivalently in the doorway of his van guarantees a laugh. Every time, Panahi turned to me and asked in bewilderment, “What are they laughing about?!” “The shift from absolute certainty to doubt, perhaps,” I’d reply.

To engage with doubt is to experience one’s humanity. That idea is central to It Was Just an Accident, and keeps us wondering throughout about ambiguities in the characters. First, there is the question of Eqbal’s identity. We may also be concerned that the group will not have the necessary “political creativity,” as Hannah Arendt called it, to come up with a solution, and that Eqbal will take revenge if his kidnappers permit him to go free. Some of the group are more determined, others less so. Only some of them develop the doubt that drives the narrative, but they all orbit the van, the hub of the action and, in itself, an active personage. In Panahi’s guerrilla filmmaking, the van also served the practical function of hiding the cast, crew, and equipment of an underground film being shot in broad daylight by a former prisoner of conscience.

This is “a film made for after the fall of the current regime,” in the words of its creator. Whether or not Iranian society is entering its post–Islamic Republic era, the film’s prophetic timing aligned its Oscar campaign with a most historic moment in Iran’s fate. During the January 2026 protests, the state almost completely lost its legitimacy with yet another mass killing in a telecommunications blackout, with death-toll estimates ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. By early March, the assassinations of Iran’s top political and military leaders in an unprovoked war by Israel and the U.S., along with the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, energy reserves, and defense systems, seemed to have brought the Islamic Republic to some of its weakest days since its formation in 1979.

In addition to the immediate Iranian context, Panahi recognizes that audiences around the world can relate to the film because they either have experiences of authoritarianism in their collective memory, are currently undergoing it, or fear its imminent rise. The film’s dilemmas resonate with today’s most pressing questions for the international community: When and where is a cycle of violence going to end, if at all? What should be done with the agents of a brutal system during and after its collapse, whether they were just following orders or loyally promoting its ideology? And after the fall of an authoritarian regime, what is a society’s capacity for a new beginning, i.e., its “natality,” as termed by Arendt? The first two questions are philosophically embedded in the plot of It Was Just an Accident. The question of natality, however, emerges and reemerges, even after the film ends, in the various interpretations of the final sequence’s sound, the source of which remains unclear.

The characters themselves portray the complexities of plurality as Arendt described them. Although in a revolutionary setting the vision for a new beginning may seem to be unified, in practice revolutionaries often find themselves competing to shape the winning narrative. The question is how to reconcile the disparate voices, if they even agree on the need for reconciliation. While each character in the group is emblematic of a type within the dissident milieu, Vahid himself closely resembles the real-life activist Mehdi Mahmoudian. Panahi met Mahmoudian in prison and later invited him to collaborate on dialogue for It Was Just an Accident. Mahmoudian, whose kidneys, like Vahid’s, were damaged while he was being tortured in prison, identified one of his torturers by his amputated arm when the man and his family entered Mahmoudian’s workplace, just as Eqbal does Vahid’s. True to his nonviolent principles, Mahmoudian amicably served his torturer, but, in a moment apart from the man’s family, reminded him of their former relationship. The former interrogator fled in fear, only to return the next day to apologize, explaining that he had just been following orders. In the film, Vahid, too, helps his torturer’s family. Unlike Mahmoudian’s torturer, Eqbal announces his ideological loyalty to the regime in the same breath with which he confesses his guilty conscience and his complexes from being bullied as a child. It is eventually Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a photojournalist in the group, who manages to bring Eqbal to his knees.

Shiva’s friend Golrokh (Hadis Pakbaten), another torture victim, enters the van in her white wedding gown, along with her politically neutral fiancé, Ali (Majid Panahi). Shiva and Golrokh, as well as Eqbal’s candid little daughter (Delnaz Najafi), who signifies hope in future generations, embody the iconoclastic agency of the Iranian women who broke away from tradition and breached the Islamic Republic’s most unassailable redline, on mandatory hijab, in the Women, Life, Freedom movement, born in 2022. The women of It Was Just an Accident represent a characteristic Panahi tribute to the significance of grassroots, bottom-up social and political change. Shiva’s abilities to doubt and to make Eqbal face himself both emerge from her desire for truth. This testifies to Panahi’s self-identification as a social, not a political, filmmaker: it is not the most polemical member of the group but the one with the strongest social roots who breaks the uncanny, cuts the shadow open, and actualizes the impossible.

Eqbal’s confession to Shiva unfolds in a twelve-and-a-half-minute medium shot of the torturer in the dark desert, illuminated only by the van’s red brake lights. Shiva and Vahid step in and out of the open frame as they force him to face his reality. The offscreen space in which the torture victims operate as whole individuals with autonomy and Arendtian natality is a neorealist window onto the intervention of social forces in the dark undercurrents of political extremism. Panahi’s principle of “visual justice,” which strives to give all characters a fair share of the camera, provides Eqbal a chance to respond and the audience ample breathing room in which to assess his self-defense. After discarding several takes, Panahi invited Mahmoudian to the set to guide the scene based on his extensive experience with interrogator-torturers. Mahmoudian’s advising and Azizi’s extraordinary performance, according to Panahi, saved the film. Blindfolded, with his hands tied behind him and his torso tightly roped to a tree, Azizi combines microexpressions of every possible facial muscle with minute vocal nuances that, again, highlight the significance of sound in this film.

Panahi embeds the question of a society’s potential to start anew in the film’s ending, which unfolds ambiguously; our interpretation of it relies on the way we hear it. The aura of secrecy surrounding all aspects of authoritarian rule keeps citizens in the dark, blindfolded metaphorically if not literally. In the absence of visual confirmation of political realities, soundscapes can guide the public’s perception of them. In the Islamic Republic, those included revolutionary songs and slogans from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when the state realized that reminding citizens of the revolution’s unrealized glorious promises was counterproductive. Since 1979, schools, radio, and television have been used for broadcasting sonic propaganda (on television, over still images or videos). Additionally, over the past two decades, residents near nuclear and military sites have reported hearing unexplained loud, unusual sounds. In auditory authoritarianism, domination of the sonic environment without freedom of information is a power mechanism that blurs facts, invites speculation, and obstructs access to knowledge. Together with data concealment, auditory authoritarianism facilitates information manipulation and thought control.

Like other prisoners of conscience, Panahi himself was blindfolded while having to respond to his interrogator, whose footsteps he heard incessantly behind him. During those sessions, his curiosity about his interrogator sharpened his hearing and shaped his sonic experience of incarceration. The narrative fulcrum of It Was Just an Accident is the haunting political soundscape of a militant religious dictatorship. This is encapsulated in the sound of the prosthetic leg belonging to Eqbal, for whom the loss of his leg while fighting for the Islamic Republic in Syria is a badge of honor. Part father figure, part ISIS fighter, part Captain Ahab, Eqbal is politically demonic and socially human. His squeaking footsteps, heard only in the opening and closing sequences of the film, together with Hamid’s loud outbursts for revenge, are sonic reminders of the social calamities of political certainty, juxtaposed against the humanity of doubt in Vahid, Shiva, and Golrokh.

Panahi has said he was uncertain about the last twenty seconds of the film until he was in the editing room. In some of the discarded shots, there was dialogue; in others, Vahid turned to face Eqbal. In the end, nothing could have better captured the psychological warfare waged by auditory authoritarianism than the scene as we have it: Vahid in close-up from behind, his upper back and neck fused with the uncertainty of whether he is hearing Eqbal’s squeaking footsteps. As we wonder if the sound is real or imagined, we are vicariously assessing the group’s natality and capacity for pluralism. Whether the peaceful family man in Eqbal overcomes the evil torturer depends, for one thing, on whether we register the sound of his footsteps as only approaching Vahid or as first getting close to him and then, after a harrowing pause, receding. Regardless of what Vahid intended to do to the torturer, his doubt, and his recognition of his own freedom to start anew, inadvertently saves three lives. In Panahi’s own words: “Are we, as people, going to continue a multigenerational cycle of violence, or are we going to say ‘cut,’ at some point, and end it?”

Desperate Living (1977)—whose opening credits feature a woman daintily eating a rat with a fork and knife—is an anomaly in Waters’ early oeuvre: it doesn’t feature Divine, who starred in most of the director’s films through the 1980s. But there are plenty of other vicious divas, wackos, and practitioners of the bizarre to admire here. Like many of Waters’ movies, it starts in the Baltimore suburbs. Picture-perfect white picket fences and piles of fall leaves. Quickly, however, we discover that Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) has just returned home from the sanatorium. Her stressed-out husband (George Stover) is surprisingly sanguine: “The road to mental health is just around the corner.” But when Mr. Gravel starts to get on his wife’s nerves, she recruits her maid, Grizelda (Jean Hill), to kill him. Peggy and Grizelda go on the lam, only to end up sexually harassed by a police officer who loves women’s underwear. “I love the feel of cold nylon on my big butt,” the cop says. Waters always calls into question the sanity of normies. “Baltimore is a city where everyone thinks they’re normal, but they’re all completely crazy,” he quipped of his hometown in a 2009 interview.

Peggy and Grizelda are exiled to Mortville, a vile little settlement of nudists and queers subject to the tyrannical Queen Carlotta (electrically played by Edith Massey, often carried around on a palanquin by a cadre of bondage-clad studs). The fugitives soon seek shelter with Mole (a dapper Susan Lowe, besieged by craggy moles) and his gorgeous lover, Muffy (the legendary stripper and actress Liz Renay). Begrudgingly, the couple allow Peggy and Grizelda safe harbor. Meanwhile, Queen Carlotta’s daughter, Princess Coo-Coo (Mary Vivian Pearce), cavorts around with a common peasant. This act of class treason, for which the princess is eventually banished by the queen, catapults the film into overdrive. When Coo-Coo hides out with Peggy and Grizelda, the royal guards quickly find her and pounce, killing Grizelda and destroying poor Mole’s house in the process.

Peggy doesn’t submit so easily. But, reinventing herself after her maid’s death, she soon joins Carlotta’s cause. She even infects the disgraced Coo-Coo with rabies at her majesty’s demand. Mole becomes the protagonist of the film, helping orchestrate a coup that ousts Carlotta and brings Peggy to her knees. The film ends with a joyful, if macabre, banquet. Carlotta herself is served as the main roast. The townsfolk gleefully dig in, mirroring the opening-credits sequence. Who’s the real pig? Waters leaves it up to us.

The camaraderie of Mortville echoes that of Waters’ own Dreamlanders, a troupe that included Desperate Living cast members Stole, Hill, Massey, Lowe, Pearce, Stover, and Cookie Mueller (who plays a Mortville resident), in addition to Divine and others. Waters, like Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini before him, regularly employed the same actors over and over. Friendship was a powerful force for these outcasts, who transmuted their pain into stardom, just as it is for Grizelda and Peggy, who become “sisters in crime,” if only for a while. Years after making films like Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble (1974), and Polyester (1981), Waters reflected on the grief he felt over the sheer number of his collaborators who had passed away prematurely: “I miss everybody. You go through the movies, and you see them. God, we were so young. Everybody should wish they had home movies of themselves, acting out their lunacy on LSD.”

In recent years, Waters has found acceptance in the mainstream, a development that he maintains a benign attitude about. It’s not as if his many accolades—from a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to multiple Grammy nominations to numerous retrospectives around the world—have made it any easier for him to make films. (David Lynch, too, had difficulty getting funding in his later years.) “The only difference is that now people are celebrating these kinds of films. When I started out, the first festival I entered, they stopped my movie halfway through,” Waters has joked with deadpan seriousness. Deviants and degenerates sell, sure, but not enough to outweigh the cultural conservatism of our current moment.

“You’re a weirdo pervert!” Muffy screams at Mole when she discovers he got phalloplasty in order to better serve her needs, about two-thirds of the way through Desperate Living. In one of the film’s most striking sequences, Mole cuts off his new dick and Muffy throws it outside, where a dog promptly eats the appendage. In an essay for Bright Wall/Dark Room, Caden Mark Gardner crowns Mole a “gender outlaw” in the anarchic style of the legendary Kate Bornstein, someone who lives outside the traditional trans-at-birth narrative and moves through the world more ambiguously. It’s not exactly that Mole is ambivalent about his masculinity—“I’m a man!” he screeches—but that he seems to have an awareness of the times, understanding that he’s being read as a butch lesbian. Despite this gender trouble, when Muffy pukes after trying to take his dick out on its maiden voyage, he swiftly severs his phallus. “So much for science, Muffy,” he moans.

The link between John Waters and trans medicine is more than satirical coincidence. Baltimore is home to what was one of the first hubs of gender-affirming surgical care: Johns Hopkins University. Desperate Living features a sequence where Mole holds the staff there at gunpoint in order to speedrun getting phallo. Only two years after the film came out, however, the clinic shut down because of conservative backlash. Perhaps this sounds familiar, given the recent closures of numerous pediatric trans clinics, and threats to trans medicine more broadly. Déjà vu. “America has finally come to resemble one of Waters’ movies,” Alex Halberstadt recently wrote in the New York Times.

Especially in his early features—made during, and in the shadow of, Richard Nixon’s presidency—Waters took ruthless aim at censorship, bourgeois norms, and other repressive regimes. For the provocative Pink Flamingos, he filmed a decked-out Divine walking down the street in real time, capturing the actual looks of disgust and bewilderment from passersby. (Fashion is always a key component in Waters’ films; he adores a sequin dress.) The fear of suburban housewives, something my fellow trannies are all too familiar with, is a motif he would return to again and again.

As for phalloplasty, it remains a rare and controversial surgery. In 2022, the New York Times published an in-depth feature by Jamie Lauren Keiles titled “How Ben Got His Penis.” As he outlines the long road of medical transition—and the many frightful aspects of such a difficult surgery—Keiles delivers a nice summation of the process: “Phalloplasty, or surgery to construct a penis, is one of medicine’s most complex procedures. Though it technically refers to one step in a long process—the construction of a phallus from a flap of one’s own skin—the term is used more generally to describe a suite of modular surgeries, each attending to a different penile function.”

Mole’s cock is not quite this advanced. It looks not unlike a floppy hot dog sewn on by the film’s costume department. Displeasure at the surgery, like Muffy’s, is not uncommon; I know many people who joke about “Frankendick,” worried about the possible complications of the procedure. One study that collated data from 2009 to 2019 found that only 766 patients had undergone phalloplasty in the state of California during that time. Part of the reason is that, unlike vaginoplasty, phalloplasty is not a one-and-done procedure—it requires multiple visits to the doctor, often over the course of several years. It’s a Herculean commitment to gender that Desperate Living transforms into a utopian drive-by event.

The debates over trans surgery can easily lend themselves to melodrama. Thank God that Waters didn’t bow down to sentimental portrayals of trans plight. Early trans pioneer and frequent Waters collaborator Elizabeth Coffey—who briefly appears in Desperate Living as a bartender in the middle of a bar brawl—also shows up in Pink Flamingos, where she flashes her dick. Apparently, she filmed the cameo just days before getting vaginoplasty—at Johns Hopkins, no less. According to Waters, “She said, ‘I did that scene because I knew that I could own that joke forever. And nobody could ever make fun of me.’ And no one ever did.” It’s a strategy Coffey may have learned from Waters: his ability to turn filth into gold by owning it. Desperate Living takes a similar approach to gender, refusing respectability in favor of jesters and pure abjection. Mole isn’t some trans-boy paragon of virtue—in his quest to topple Queen Carlotta, he’s just as despicable as any of Waters’ cissies.

Not everyone in Desperate Living is so liberation-minded about being an outsider. “I have never found the antics of deviants to be one bit amusing,” Peggy chirps. She praises Carlotta’s despotism and hails her neat and orderly grip on Mortville: “A single gunshot can never destroy the beauty of fascism.” She hates the Supreme Court but only because of its occasional liberal decisions, not because it’s the head of a branch of the U.S. government. Her hysteria in the suburbs is a symptom not of the surrounding area’s placid banality but of the fact that this milieu isn’t fascist enough. (When she has sex with Grizelda, perhaps under duress, she ekes out, “This is so unnatural!” before seemingly succumbing to the pleasure.) The satire is complete when Peggy becomes a witch and cooks up a rabies potion to serve the princess for her crimes. Waters’ script is full of these verbal and visual zingers—he’s one of the best modern screenwriters. His literary slapstick provides some of the finest screwball comedy this side of Bringing Up Baby (1938) or What’s Up, Doc? (which came out the same year as Pink Flamingos). It’s a gift that Waters’ screenplays have been published as books, helping the superfan to memorize his wisecracking ripostes.

There are many acolytes of John Waters in the modern-day filmmaking world—Jamie Babbit, Vera Drew, Louise Weard, and Julia Ducournau—auteurs pushing the bounds of cinematic respectability. Instead of turning the transgressive into mere sadistic punishment, these filmmakers offer gleeful, sensual, cackling subversion. Hedonism should be fun! What a radical concept. Waters knows this instinctively. Desperate Living is a brilliant portrait of delicious rebellion, of a world where the outcasts set aside their differences and band together, and where fascists are not merely overthrown but devoured.