Current | The Criterion Collection

On Restoration and Repair: A Conversation with Ja’Tovia Gary

Beandrea July — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:55:00 +0000

“The wig has a name. The wig’s name is Pam.”

I was not even a little surprised to hear that Dallas-born filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary had given a name to the bouncy brown bob she wears in her film The Giverny Document (2019). The wig takes on a presence of its own, allowing Gary to embody a talk-show-host persona as she stops Black women on the streets of Harlem to ask, “Do you feel safe?” This character dons a navy blue, military-style jacket with gold buttons (think Michael Jackson) and speaks with a palpable warmth as she extends her mic to passersby. The multi-award-winning film traverses between Harlem and a very different location—the lush gardens of Giverny, France, where Gary held the Terra Foundation Summer Artist Residency in 2016. In the scenes shot in this Edenic sanctuary, Gary plays the Negress, wandering in an easy floral dress—and sometimes in Eve-like nudity. She is bold, curious, and unashamed, certain of her right to be there just as she is. In both settings, Gary is channeling someone who isn’t quite herself but somehow reveals an essential part of who she is: “I think both the character of the Negress in the Garden and the Woman on the Street who’s wearing Pam—those are iterations of myself in some regard,” Gary tells me.

The Criterion Channel is now presenting a showcase of Gary’s work featuring three of her films. Alongside The Giverny Document are Quiet as It’s Kept (2023), her pulsating call-and-response tribute to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and An Ecstatic Experience (2015), which explores the meaning of liberation through testimonies of Black women. Gary’s films blend animation—created through handmade techniques applied directly to film stock—with Kuleshov-style montage and audiovisual citations from nontraditional archives like the internet. Though she delights in abstraction and nonlinear form, Gary doesn’t love being labeled an “experimental filmmaker.” “If experimental wasn’t marginalized and diminished, I would have no problem being called experimental,” she says when we speak in February. Gary has just gone through an initiation practiced in her longtime religious tradition of Lucumi, which requires her to keep her video off during the interview. Her West African, Yoruba-based religion centers around the veneration of ancestors. “If stories are how we formulate reality—how we make sense of our experience here—but they all follow the same outline,” she continues, “then by changing the form, I’m modeling that you can create a reality radically different from the one you exist under.”

Ja’Tovia, who gave you your name, and what meaning does it hold for you?: My name, which I’ve grown to love over the years—I didn’t always love it—was given to me by my mother, Jocelyn. Everyone in my nuclear family has a name that starts with J.

My mother didn’t really have a meaning for it. She and my father were living in Palermo, Sicily—my dad used to be in the Navy. The story goes that they knew someone named Octavio, and—you know how Black people are—they decided to add the “Ja” and make it Ja’Tovia.

My theater teacher at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas—Ms. Vicki Washington—gave me a meaning for the name: “she who will not be deterred.” And I hang on to that.

You grew up in the Pentecostal church. Do you think there’s a connection between that background and performance? People talk about answering the call to ministry—did theater feel like your version of that?: What I’m doing right now may be a version of that. When I was a young person, theater was more about self-regulating. That was before I even understood what that meant. I just knew that when I got onstage and expressed myself physically and creatively through performance, I felt better. I felt better in my body and about who I was. It quieted my mind and gave me an outlet. Having access to arts education and the stage—and these incredible instructors and mother figures—really was lifesaving.

How did you make the transition from being a student at Booker T. Washington and acting to being interested in making films?: I made my first film on VHS while I was at Booker T. Washington. I was probably sixteen or seventeen. I had this boyfriend at another school—Mrs. Washington is actually his mother—and we were just two young artists. That first film was a kind of love letter to him. I got all my friends together. At that school everyone is extremely talented—dancers, singers, visual artists, musicians. People recited poetry, people sang. It was kind of a precursor to this nontraditional, nonlinear narrative structure in my work. It was a mosaic.

I didn’t start taking cinema seriously until I moved to New York and was pursuing acting. I started running into limitations around representation and autonomy in the roles I was being asked to audition for. Not all of them were disturbing, but enough of them made me feel that acting wasn’t giving me the freedom I needed.

At the same time I became interested in documentary and history. I was watching all kinds of historical documentaries—about Marcus Garvey, about Josephine Baker, about political issues. Eventually I returned to school and studied Africana Studies and documentary film production. It became a way to bring together my curiosity about Black culture and history with storytelling.

Top of page: The Giverny Document; above: Quiet as It’s Kept

I want to get into the films that are on Criterion. I’d like to start with Quiet as It’s Kept, especially since yesterday was Toni Morrison’s birthday.: Originally the idea of exploring Toni Morrison cinematically was presented to me by a critic who wanted to commission it for a show. I usually don’t do commissions because I don’t like having a boss. But I loved the idea of thinking through Morrison cinematically. We used The Bluest Eye, which is one of my favorite texts, as a point of departure. I wasn’t interested in adapting it. I wanted to be in conversation with it. If Morrison were here, this film would be what I’d say to her about that book from my perspective as a Southern Black millennial queer woman.

You’ve said editing is where you make the film.: Yes, I remember going to the Flaherty Seminar when Christopher Harris and Cauleen Smith were speaking. Someone asked why they edit their own films, and they said the edit is where we make the film. I almost screamed when they said it.

Everybody’s process and practice is their own and deserves consideration, but for me, the edit is where the thing called filmmaking occurs. The edit is like writing. I wouldn’t hand my notes to another writer to assemble them into a text. The edit is the writing.

When you were interviewing people on the street in Harlem wearing the wig in The Giverny Document, were you consciously creating a character?: Yes. Something shifts when I put on the wig. I’m channeling talk-show culture from the 1990s—Rolonda Watts, Oprah, Phil Donahue, even Ricki Lake. Talk shows were an important cultural commons. I feel talk shows are very much within a documentary tradition. They revealed the desires and anxieties of the collective. So I wanted to think about the various modes that documentary has gone through over the ages. One of those modes is vox populi, voice of the people. You can sometimes get to a really intimate and revelatory moment with a stranger on the street.

The Giverny Document

The interviews in The Giverny Document were really moving to me as a Black woman who’s experienced some of the things that your woman-on-the-street interviews revealed. Did you have a lot more interviews than you included in the film?: Every person who stopped, I included. It wasn’t just about one or two, it was about the chorus. Saidiya Hartman talks about how the chorus can provide a mosaic of the reality that we live in, especially if the chorus is voices that are historically silenced. If anything, the experiment feels incomplete because I didn’t encounter transwomen during filming. If we really want to talk about safety, that’s who we need to be talking to.

Why do you think that is?: I think there are many factors. My goal when I make these films is for someone to see them a hundred years from now and say this is resonant and applicable or restorative for me, but I think the timing was key. And I think it’s so densely layered that even though it does not reflect everyone’s lived experience, there are pieces, moments, and feelings that emerge that people can latch on to. It feels like a poem in a way, and you don’t understand every line of the poem, but maybe there’s this one stanza or this one couplet that does something for you.

Your films also feature a technique that involves etching directly onto 16 mm film.: So, direct animation is the overarching name of several techniques. Etching is one of the techniques; you are etching directly into the surface of the film, into the emulsion. Sometimes people are painting onto the surface of the film, or you are masking out certain parts of the film. It’s basically hand-processing techniques. Some people, like Stan Brakhage and Len Lye, call this cameraless filmmaking. I had a really interesting professor in graduate school called Michel Negroponte, and he told me that I was going to need to supplement my education, that I was going to need to use New York City as my other classroom. And I found a place in Brooklyn called Mono No Aware. This is where I began to learn about these techniques and incorporate them into my practice. For me, the handmade element is important. I consider the films to be objects as well as experiences. There’s a sculptural element. I am not one of those filmmakers who’s always chasing the latest and greatest gadget, the sharpest camera. I’m absolutely consumed with the archive and small-gauge filmmaking and hand-processing. I think the intimacy that is created while you are making something can be transmitted, so it’s important for me to hold on to that and to spend that time creating that relationship with the material. It takes a really long time to etch, and that’s where the magic is stored.

An Ecstatic Experience

You’ve also talked about Soviet montage theory as an influence.: Yes, the Kuleshov effect. When you place one image next to another, meaning emerges. If you change one image, the meaning changes. They are these psychological landscapes that are being painted. So I find this technique and the various ways that montages can be assembled extremely helpful. When I’m trying to paint an interior picture for a viewer, there’s so much meaning that can be made just by placing images next to one another. John Akomfrah and Arthur Jafa would call this “affective proximity.” What are you feeling emotionally? What are you feeling psychologically? Not just: what happens next in the narrative?

On the topic of citing internet archives, Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message is one of the most well-known examples of films that do this. But your film An Ecstatic Experience actually came out a couple years earlier.: You know how many people say, “Oh, you were inspired by Arthur Jafa”? Everyone wants to make Arthur Jafa my dad, and I love AJ. He hates when I call him Uncle, but this is my southern uncle. We’re from the same region of the country. We come from very similar traditions, so it's no wonder that there are threads that are similar. But I’ve had multiple curators—usually they’re white men, sometimes they are Black people—say “you’re very much in this tradition of Arthur Jafa.” It’s erasure. It’s all love and respect to my uncle. I’ll forever give him his praises. He is my elder. I have learned a lot from him. He’s given me permission to speak very freely about my practice and to be my full self, which is why I don’t feel no type of way saying this: I did not get my ideas around montage editing from his film.

How do you listen for what a particular piece is asking of you while you’re making it?: I can’t even tell you how I listen. I just know that it is a listening. Initially, I’m working with ideas and thoughts and feelings that I’m scribbling down, and then I start culling images. If we’re talking about Quiet as It’s Kept, I knew that I wanted Toni Morrison’s voice in there somehow. And again, to shout out Michel Negroponte, he would always say to me, “Just put it on the timeline.” In your editing software, just start putting things there. Beginning is hard, but if you just start putting things down, like a painter would begin to put a stroke down or make a mark, then you begin to see things next to one another. So I’m listening, I’m watching, and I’m also reading while I’m making. And this is something that I tell younger filmmakers: “Don’t just go to film school. What do you know about the world?”

As a Black woman, I feel nourished by your films. There’s a caring that happens. I may not understand everything, but I know I can watch this and I’m not going to be harmed by it. And I think that’s really powerful, and something more filmmakers ought to think about.: We are deeply invested in care. These are restorative gestures. These are healing gestures. Some things are going to be uncomfortable, but we’re not trying to break you. We’re destabilized only in that we have to rip off the veil. We have to tell the truth straight. We’re operating in the Black feminist tradition, and that’s one of restoration and repair.

Next Stop: The Criterion Mobile Closet in Portland, Oregon

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 12:26:00 +0000

Since its debut in 2024 at the New York Film Festival, the Criterion Mobile Closet has made wildly successful stops in cities across the United States and Canada. For our first trip this year, in partnership with PAM CUT, Criterion is bringing the Mobile Closet to Portland, Oregon, in May—and visitors can look forward to some exciting additional programming, including a series of screenings and a live recording of Adventures in Moviegoing with Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the actors, writers, and cocreators behind Portlandia. Read on for more details!

May 29–31: Criterion x PAM CUT

Location

SW Madison Street and South Park Blocks, across the street from the Portland Art Museum’s main entrance

Opening Hours

Friday, May 29: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Saturday, May 30: 11 a.m.–7 p.m.
Sunday, May 31: 10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Stocked with more than 1,700 of the greatest films from around the world, the Criterion Collection Closet may offer more cinematic inspiration per square foot than any other place on the planet. Filmmakers, stars, and creative luminaries of all kinds come to Criterion to champion their favorite films in our popular Criterion Closet Picks video series.

Since we started taking the Closet out on the road, film lovers across the country have joined us to explore the collection and make their own Closet videos. Portland will be our eighth stop.

If you’re planning to join us in Portland, please sign up here to get important real-time updates on location, the opening and closing of our line, logistics, etc.

Please note: signing up here does not guarantee entry to our Mobile Closet experience.

Additional Programming

PAM CUT will present three films programmed by Criterion: Monterey Pop (May 23), Paris Is Burning (May 24), and Something Wild (May 30).

On Sunday, May 31, at 7 p.m., Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein will join us for a live recording of the Criterion Channel original series Adventures in Moviegoing. In this intimate conversation, the longtime collaborators will reflect on how they came to love cinema and on the movies that inspire them.

Buy tickets here!

Enjoy this teaser for our weekend in Portland!

Getting to the Mobile Closet

Public Transportation: Multiple bus, streetcar, and MAX light-rail lines will drop you off within a few short blocks of the museum. Use TriMet’s Trip Planner to map out the best transit route from your location.

Parking: Ample paid parking is available within a few blocks of the museum, including street parking, surface lots, and parking garages.

How It Works

The Criterion Closet is stocked with every in-print edition from the Criterion Collection, including box sets, as well as all in-print releases from our Eclipse and Criterion Premieres lines.
The Mobile Closet will be open to the general public until we reach capacity for the day.
There is currently no reservation or advance ticketing system in place; just show up at the location at the designated time and take your place in line. Out of respect for the communities we visit, we thank you for arriving just before we form the line. Up to four people can share a Closet visit, so bring your friends or make friends in line! (We encourage group visits.)
As long as supplies last, you’ll receive a Criterion tote bag and a printed pocket guide to the Criterion Collection.
Use the pocket guide to find films you love from the Collection. The numbered order of the films in the guide matches the order of the films in the Closet so that you can easily find what you’re looking for once inside.
If you don’t know what to choose, don’t worry! Just tell us about a film or filmmaker you love, and we’ll help you find something that fits you.
Although we’ll have our camera rolling throughout the Closet visit, there’s absolutely no pressure to perform or talk about your selections. Your experience in the Closet is yours to create!
If you would like to film or photograph your visit on your own camera or phone, you’re welcome to use our wall mount.
Each Closet visit will last three minutes. Once the clock starts (spoiler: it’s when you enter!), you’ll have that time to explore the collection or talk about your selections. Don’t worry—the Criterion Closet team is there to help you find what you’re looking for, and if all you want to do is look around, that’s okay too!
No purchase is required, but you are able to buy up to three items with our special Mobile Closet discount of 40 percent off. A limited amount of Criterion merch may also be available for purchase at the time of your visit. We accept credit cards only.
At the end of every Closet visit, we take a Polaroid of our visitors with their selections, which will be yours to keep as a souvenir along with the tote bag and guide to the Collection, while supplies last.
You might be featured on our social feeds, so keep an eye out and be sure to follow us on social media: Instagram, X, and Facebook.

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FAQ

Point Blank: A Dream of Full-Color Noir

Geoff Dyer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 11:52:00 +0000

It’s all a bit confusing. Point Blank is based on a novel called The Hunter by Richard Stark, one of several pseudonyms adopted by Donald E. Westlake. The book was republished as Payback in 1999 to tie in with a film adaptation starring Mel Gibson, while the 2019 movie directed by Joe Lynch is a remake of a 2010 French film, À bout portant, directed by Fred Cavayé and retitled Point Blank for its English-language release. Oh, and aside from the title, Bruce Springsteen’s song “Point Blank” has nothing to do with John Boorman’s 1967 film.

The protagonist of The Hunter is called Parker. Of all the changes made to the original script—“appalling,” in Boorman’s opinion, “a collection of clichés,” he told Lee Marvin when they first met; “a piece of shit,” Marvin agreed—none was more fundamental than the switch from Parker to Walker. The hunter, one who hunts, was Parker, one who parks. Marvin does a bit of parking, outside Lynne’s LA apartment building, for example, though we never actually see him park, which is fine because parking can be as difficult to make interesting on film as it is sometimes difficult to do in real life, and if the scene in which Walker takes the convertible for a punishing test-drive from John Stegman’s car lot is anything to go by it’s likely that parking in a tight spot will result in severe damage to any vehicles in the vicinity. So, no parking but plenty of walking. “Walking is a form of thinking,” writes John Berger in Pig Earth, and Walker is always thinking. Even when he’s not walking—just sitting or standing—he’s thinking, and what he’s thinking about is getting his money back. What does he want? His money. What does he really want? I really want my money, he says after a moment of puzzled reflection, really putting the dead in deadpan, but the more he repeats this answer the less convincing it sounds, or the more the quest for his ninety-three thousand takes on the financially incalculable quality of deeper existential questions. It was Pinter rather than Beckett who influenced the “laconic and oblique dialogue” of the rewritten script, but Walker might as well have said he was waiting for Godot, even if he’s not waiting but walking. If walking is a form of thinking it might also be a form of not waiting, the opposite of waiting, and although Walker is so determined to get his money as to seem possessed by a kind of somnambulistic patience, it would be absurd if he’d been called Waiter. So that’s what Walker wants—his money—and does: walks.

When we think of a painting we see it whole in our mind’s eye. Films are remembered synecdochically, a few images or scenes standing in for the unfolding whole. Point Blank imprints itself in memory with the sequence of the aptly named Walker walking along the aptly named walkway after arriving at LAX, propelled by the percussive beat of his brogues. The camera is waist-high, looking up at him as he looks straight ahead, walking through the extreme anamorphic perspective of the walkway. Walking on film is not just walking, it’s also acting, one of the ways in which psychology is manifested externally. So there’s a lot going on in this walk, and much of that lot involves reducing everything about the walk—thinking, psychology—to nothing but walking. Even to say he’s thinking about walking is to overburden what he’s doing with cognition. He’s walking briskly, not dawdling, but neither is he hurrying.

Arriving at LAX I enjoy walking this same walk, but it’s always compromised by my casual clothes, my soundless sneakers, and—worse still—the fact that I’m usually dragging a wheelie suitcase. I mention this because Walker is luggage-free, which is odd given the number of costume changes he’ll make during his highly eventful sojourn in Los Angeles. This means either that he’s checked a bag and will have to wait at the luggage carousel (which seems out of character) or that, in addition to taking down all the people standing between him and his money, he’ll have to go clothes shopping on Rodeo Drive (even more out of character). The relentless clacking of brogues continues on the soundtrack even after Walker’s stopped walking and started driving, after he’s parked and waiting for Lynne to get home. When she does he bursts in behind her—unannounced, to put it mildly—storms into the bedroom, and shoots Mal where he lies, before realizing that he’s been blasting away, impotently, at an empty bed.

By now we realize what’s going on. Namely, that the young English director has got so much cinema in him he’s going to spike this hard-boiled thriller with all the stuff he’s absorbed from other films, other directors, often European (the “fractured structure” of Renoir) but also American (is there a hint of Corman psychedelia as the bottles of liquids and perfumes slosh around in the basin of Lynne’s bathroom after Walker has accidentally smashed a bottle of something that might appropriately be called blue ruin?).

Walker pauses in the vacant aftermath of this strange, oneiric episode. There’s lots of other stuff and people he’ll have to smash up in pursuit of his dough, and this will lead him ultimately not to smashing but to putting a dent in “the Organization.” Unnamed or perhaps named in the same generic way as Walker himself, the Organization suggests that America is, in David Thomson’s phrase, “a complex of organized crime,” but it would be a mistake to think of Marvin as some kind of avenging fallen angel trying to tear down the corrupt and complex edifice of American capitalism. He wants his money.

So on he goes, violently biting his way up the fiduciary food chain, dressed casually only in flashback, back in his early days with Lynne, before she started leaning toward Mal, or when they were doing the Alcatraz heist, but this simple claim is a little hard to sustain since everything from that point on might be a flashback from the moment of his dying, when a movie-dream of impeccably dressed vengeance floats through his head. The suits and sports coats he sports for the rest of the movie are not the best clothes for fighting, especially from a contemporary perspective of hoodies and trainers, but as Boorman explained, Marvin’s clothes were “severely tailored to allow no wrinkle or ruck—they were armor.” There’s no excess cloth on the suits, and after Marvin had contrived to give the novice director the boon of final approval on everything, Boorman shored up this position of extraordinary freedom by shooting a minimum of footage so that even if the studio did try to recut his movie they’d have little filmic cloth to play with. The bond between director and star was tight.

In the catalog to the exhibition of William Eggleston’s photographs that he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1976, John Szarkowski wrote of how Eggleston had “learned to see in color.” Point Blank was Boorman’s first experience of shooting in color, but to say he was a quick learner is to understate his precocity. Not only did he become instantly fluent in this new language, he developed a grammar of cinematic color as advanced as Antonioni’s in Red Desert or Blow-Up. The clothes, along with everything else—furniture, curtains, cars, sky—are color coordinated, each scene having its particular color harmony, from the silver grays of the early scenes at Lynne’s place to deep blues at the car lot, and on to yellows and browns at Huntley House, where Angie Dickinson (Chris, a seductive Trojan horse) agrees to yield to Mal’s advances. But—and this is essential—there is nothing schematic about this color scheme. It looks so natural that you barely notice it—you notice and respond to the colors, of course, without that response being resisted and therefore diminished by consciousness of directorial insistence. This is all the more remarkable given that all the needs of plot and story—including locations—are subordinated to the film’s aesthetic and rhythm (which, as that walkway sequence makes clear, are inextricably linked). That might be why, watching Point Blank on TV as a seventeen-year-old, I first became dimly—unconsciously, even—aware that there might be more to a movie than what was happening to the people on-screen. The most remarkable thing, though, is that the film never seems overstylized. Why? Because there’s nothing inessential in Boorman’s vision. Devoid of all twists and turns, so little remains of the plot that it can be powered by the director’s saturated aesthetic, a dream of full-color noir.

Devoid of irony and knowingness, it’s also unexpectedly funny. In addition to the Pinteresque dialogue, we have Carroll O’Connor (later to find fame as Archie Bunker in All in the Family) telling Walker—after he’s walloped someone in the kisser with a .44 Magnum—that he’s a very bad man, asking why he’s running around doing things like this. The night before, in that same house up in Curson Canyon, Angie Dickinson (who compels David Thomson to confess that the alphabetical imperatives of his Biographical Dictionary of Film leave him “torn between his duty to everyone from Thorold Dickinson to Zinnemann and the plain fact that Angie is his favorite actress”) starts slapping Walker around in the living room. He has survived getting shot on the Rock, and he stands there and takes it, like a rock. At the end of this sequence (which can be seen on YouTube, with Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music” cleverly substituting for the original audio) Angie collapses in the face of—at the feet of—his implacable Walkerness. Next she sets in motion a kind of revolt of the appliances, turning on every mixer, stereo, blender, toaster, and gadget in the modernist house where they’re holing up. Earlier, after she’d helped him get to Mal in the Huntley, she’d left him in the street with the parting words, “You died at Alcatraz, all right.” In this she was echoing Boorman’s suspicion that one of the things that drew Marvin to the role was the fear “that he had lost some essential element of his humanity in [the] brutal experience” of fighting and being wounded as a combat marine in the Pacific. Certainly it’s only as a result of violence that Walker ends up in Chris’s arms, after she decks him with a pool cue. This is not the only time that violence has the quality of quasi-erotic dance. The ballet of assault and battery that erupts backstage at the nightclub—with the projections and blaring funk, it’s like an auto-destructive Happening—comes to a climax with Walker taking deliberate aim and punching one of his assailants between the legs. Mal thinks he’s about to have sex with Chris (at last) only to find that it’s Walker and his naked gun—the white hair encourages this association—inching their hard way toward him under the slinky color-coordinated sheet. That sheet is the only thing he’s wearing as he’s sashayed to the penthouse balcony, forced to acknowledge that, since it barely covers him, it’s not going to serve as much of a parachute. It’s not just a matter of movement, either the actors’ or the camera’s; it’s also about Marvin’s “way of looking”—Thomson again—“when blank hostility faded into hopeless desire.” Which brings us back to his money, to that ninety-three grand he’s determined to get his hands on. The violence might not be a means to get at the money; it might be a way of buying narrative opportunities for inflicting—and being on the receiving end of—hurt. Either way, as he kneels down to rip open the packet of money with his handgun in the concrete trickle of the LA River, he doesn’t seem unduly surprised or concerned to find that it’s stuffed with worthless paper. Maybe he’s relieved because what would he go on to do if he did get his $93K back? That’s a question he’s not going to answer until, with the inevitability of a parable, we end up back where it all started—or ended—at Alcatraz.

Point Blank “did well” when it opened but, in Boorman’s words, “was not a blockbuster.” In France (understandably and a little surprisingly since L’Anglais Boorman had out-Frenched the French in their fascination with the cinematic possibilities of American policiers) it was acclaimed as a masterpiece. That’s been the consensus verdict for a long time now, but—and this is not always the case, as the accumulation of praise can cause masterpieces to suffer a paradoxical softening or erosion—it retains the jagged shock and jolt of its initial execution and release. An unexpected dissenter is Quentin Tarantino, who, in Cinema Speculation, is dismissive of both the film (“After the show-off opening Point Blank settles down into sixties television”) and its star, who acts “like a leafless tree.” Hmm. That is less persuasive and less important than the way Point Blank has embedded itself in movie culture as source, influence, and reference point. Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets has a Point Blank poster on his bedroom wall and, in a more mature incarnation, in Reservoir Dogs, listens as Michael Madsen tells him, “I bet you’re a big Lee Marvin fan, aren’t ya?” I’d always assumed this was a bit of ventriloquism on Tarantino’s part. And even if it’s not and he’s not (a fan) I can’t help but associate the attempted smackdown with that of Angie Dickinson: assault as expression of frustrated love.

This essay © Geoff Dyer. All quotations here, unless otherwise attributed, are from John Boorman’s Adventures of a Suburban Boy.

Sinister Synergies

Max Read — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:42:00 +0000

From a distance—looking down, say, from a penthouse office in a glass-paned downtown skyscraper—the U.S. economy of the 1990s and early 2000s could feel almost boring. Between Black Monday in 1987 and the Global Financial Crisis twenty years later, growth was steady, markets were mostly stable, and inflation was historically low. The “central problem of depression prevention”—that is, the key aim of economic policymaking since the 1930s—“has been solved,” the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas argued in 2003; dissenters to this rosy view of the dismal science were dismissed as cranks and luddites.

Whoops! Not quite two decades on from the Great Moderation, we find ourselves still stumbling through the social, political, and economic hangover it left behind. Rampant deregulation, accelerating deindustrialization, and an increasingly financialized and computerized economy gave us the GFC, and the vastly unequal economy it left in its wake—channeling gains toward capital, speculators, and a small number of professionals, while leaving workers in the lurch—helped birth the reactionary populism now tearing up global trade.

But how could the economists have known? Well, maybe they should have gone to more movies. In the years between Black Monday and the GFC, Hollywood—itself corporatizing, consolidating, and financializing in a surge of mergers and acquisitions—produced a wave of corporate thrillers driven by anxieties about the economic transformations grinding away in the background of steadily growing GDP. Viewed from the C-suite and the private jet, the economy may have looked fine. But seen from the movie-theater seat and the Blockbuster aisle, it was quite clear something sinister was happening.

Early on in Wall Street (1987), the eager young stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) is begging for a second chance from Gordon Gekko, a wily corporate raider played with slimy thrill by Michael Douglas. “What about hard work?” Bud whines in the back of Gekko’s limo. “What about it?” Gekko snarls. “You worked all night researching that dog stock you sold me and look where it got you . . . Wake up pal, will you? If you’re not inside, you’re outside.”

It’s this final line, more than the more famous “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” that typifies the corporate thrillers of the period, which are generally less concerned with specific assessments of capitalism than with quasi-allegorical journeys from the outside to the inside, where our hardworking and ambitious heroes confront the corrupt inner workings at the heart of the modern economy. On Stone’s Wall Street, only old-fashioned fools and dupes try to trade stocks based on sober analysis and within the bounds of securities law; the real advantage is provided by insider trading, straw buying, and other kinds of fraud. Having worked his way to the commanding heights of finance, Bud finds nothing but criminal conspiracy and nonproductive speculation. Bud, the son of an airline shop steward, is troubled by this nihilism. Gekko is not: “I create nothing. I own. We make the rules, pal,” he tells Bud.

What the movies that followed Wall Street took from it was less Stone’s grounded if shallow critique of financial capitalism and more the texture and structure of Bud’s descent from the grasping outside to the corrupt inside. Throughout the ’90s and 2000s, ambitious young naifs were constantly being inducted on-screen into tony corporate offices eventually revealed as frauds, scams, rackets, and even literal cults. In The Firm (1993), directed by Sydney Pollack, Tom Cruise’s Harvard Law grad—the Bud Fox–ishly named Mitch McDeere—discovers that the boutique Memphis tax-law firm that gave him a Mercedes 300CE convertible and settled his student loans is actually an arm of the Chicago Outfit, prone to killing partners who seem like they might talk. In Antitrust (2001), genius programmer Milo Hoffman (Ryan Phillippe) is recruited to work for the tech giant NURV, whose Bill Gates–like founder Gary Winston (an unsettlingly soft-spoken Tim Robbins) has built an empire out of code stolen from independent programmers murdered by a team of coder–hit men.

Top of post: Wall Street; above: The Firm

That it was Pollack steering the fine studio entertainment of The Firm is fitting, and not just because he had made his own journey to the inside, becoming one of Hollywood’s great company men and a trusted maker of corporate product. The Firm and Antitrust both closely resemble Pollack’s great Three Days of the Condor (1975) in their stories of low-level insiders who stumble upon conspiracies and find themselves surveilled, blackmailed, compromised, and on the run. The difference is that these movies were made in an era where the locus of power, and therefore conspiracy, had moved from the government to the corporation; here, it’s not the CIA you have to worry about but the boardroom. Indeed, in The Firm the feds are largely impotent and easily held at bay; in Antitrust, the justice department is just another tentacle of the NURV octopus.

Maybe just as importantly for fomenting paranoia, the corporation is where all the mystification happens. As the economy becomes all but illegible to ordinary people, the only possible way to explain consolidation and inequality is in terms of mafia-sponsored tax-dodging schemes and techie murder conspiracies. On the one hand, this is all a bit ridiculous; on the other, well, a tech giant built on a foundation of stolen intellectual property? A white-shoe law firm helping clients hide money offshore? Some specific details may be wrong—among other things, no programmer in history has ever looked or sounded like young Ryan Phillippe—but the broad strokes are correct: something rotten is happening within the upper echelons of corporate America.

No movie more explicitly, enjoyably, or flamboyantly articulates this intuition than The Devil’s Advocate (1997), directed by the reliable Hollywood veteran Taylor Hackford and written by Tony Gilroy, who would eventually enter the Disney inner sanctum as the showrunner behind Andor (2022–2025). Here, again, we have a beautiful young working-class go-getter—Keanu Reeves, intermittently affecting an accent as southern defense attorney Kevin Lomax—selected and groomed for success by a powerful older man, in this case a grinning Al Pacino, strutting about in Cuban heels, as the superlawyer John Milton. At Milton’s behest, Lomax moves from Gainesville to Park Avenue; he attends parties with senators and represents millionaires.

The Devil’s Advocate

But something isn’t right. At home, his wife (Charlize Theron) is losing it; when she goes shopping with other lawyers’ wives, their smiles contort demonically, and she dreams of a baby playing with entrails. “I know we’ve got all this money, and it’s supposed to be OK, but it’s not,” she tells Kevin, before slitting her throat in a locked hospital room. In Milton’s concrete penthouse apartment, Lomax confronts his boss, who reveals that the firm is indeed a front, not in this case for an insider trading scheme, or the mafia, or a murder ring, but for literal, actual Satan—Milton himself. No actor in history (for better or worse) has ever had as much fun as Pacino does revealing the truth of his identity, and of the world: “Who, in their right mind,” he asks Lomax, “could possibly deny that the twentieth century was entirely mine?”

Lomax, confronted with this reality, shoots himself in the head, and is transported back to Gainesville, where his adventure in New York is understood as a daydream. Fox, we assume, heads to jail; Hoffman exposes Winston on local cable-access; and McDeere moves back to Cambridge, where surely he’ll never encounter another powerful and menacing sexual-extortion racket.

These are all guys who wanted out, once they’d made it inside. But what about the reverse? If one version of the corporate thriller follows the journey from outside to inside, another draws its narrative tension from movement in the other direction, exploring what happens as you go from the inside to outside, and get left behind as the economy, and the social order, transform.

In Disclosure (1994), Michael Douglas, only seven years removed from Wall Street, trades in his contrast collars for a toothpaste-stained tie as Tom Sanders, a middle manager for the tech company DigiCom on the eve of an important merger. Sanders isn’t a Gekko-style slick—you can tell because his hair is too feathery, too mullet-like—but he’s no slouch, either; he expertly manages a global supply chain manufacturing CD-ROM drives and arrives to his Seattle office at the start of the movie expecting a deserved promotion. But even as he ably surfs the changing tides of globalization, he finds himself caught out by the treachery of gender politics: His new boss Meredith Johnson, a former girlfriend played by Demi Moore, seduces him and then accuses him of assaulting her. Sanders, in turn, accuses her of sexual harassment; as the case unfolds, it becomes clear that more is going on than the simple assignation.

Disclosure is lethally symptomatic of its era, and, as such, lethally prescient about ours: it’s hard to imagine a movie that more efficiently compresses preoccupations about male sexual anxiety in the workplace and a disruptive tech boom dependent on Asian manufacturing into an actually-fairly-entertaining two-hour feature. But at its core, it’s a movie about being left out—thinking you were on the inside and finding yourself on the outside. Sanders is constantly missing meetings, arriving late, finding himself a step behind, catching glimpses of things through the glass walls of the DigiCom office.

Disclosure

Befitting the strangeness of the Great Moderation economy, the stakes are effectively nonexistent—“If this deal goes through, we’ll be rich,” Sanders tells his wife, who responds, “we’re already rich”; when Johnson’s assault accusation is levied, the biggest threat to Sanders isn’t jail or even social sanction, it’s being sent to Austin, Texas—but are cast as existential. DigiCom’s business is about to be supercharged, everyone agrees, and the worst possible outcome is to be left behind. In the movie’s inevitable virtual-reality climax, Sanders becomes something like a ghost, watching helplessly as a wireframe Johnson, oblivious to his existence, goes about deleting exonerating files.

If the conspiratorial structure of corporate-thriller plots reflect an increasingly mystified and stratified U.S. economy, the recurring use of mergers and acquisitions to establish dramatic stakes in these movies—beginning with Wall Street, which uses Gordon Gekko’s hostile takeover of Bluestar Airlines its central dramatic device—should be seen as a reverberation of Hollywood’s own experience of consolidation over the twenty years between Black Monday and the GFC. Sanders’s jockeying for position around corporate restructuring was probably a familiar experience to the executives at Warner Bros who greenlit Disclosure; the studio had merged with Time, Inc., in 1989, in a deal that was nearly thwarted at the last minute by a hostile-takeover bid from Paramount parent conglomerate Gulf+Western.

The rapid consolidation that would follow over the following two decades didn’t necessarily seem like a hazard for the movie industry as either a creative or a business concern; major studios and especially their independent arms enjoyed a remarkable run of critical and commercial success even as their ownership concentrated, and corporate profits soared. In the eighteen months before Disclosure was released, Viacom bought Paramount for $10 billion, and Disney bought Miramax for $60 million; the resulting conglomerates would win the Best Picture Oscars for the next five years and make the executives involved unimaginably rich (while also, notably given Disclosure’s subject matter, ignoring horrifying whispers of serial sexual assault by Miramax’s CEO Harvey Weinstein). No wonder, then, that the DigiCom merger is treated mainly as a threat to Sanders’s personal standing and potential future earnings, rather than the business’s product or profits.

Sanders ultimately clears his name, and despite the internal conspiracy he’s discovered, the merger goes through. He isn’t left behind—yet. But who can say what might happen to DigiCom, over the next decade? Maybe it would be capsized by the tech bubble bursting in 2001, or, given the clear problems with its corporate culture, caught in an accounting scandal like the one that collapsed Enron that same year. Or maybe the disc-drive manufacturing company—a tempting acquisition for a media empire driven by DVD-sales profits—would end up as a subsidiary of one of the Big Six conglomerates that, by the mid-2000s, bankrolled the vast majority of movies seen by Americans.

Where the mergers and acquisitions in Wall Street, Disclosure, and Antitrust—morally ambiguous though they might be—appear as gateways to wealth and success for those movies’ heroes, the plot-driving merger in Michael Clayton (2007) is treated more like a closing bell. The New York–based firm Kenner, Bach & Ledeen is about to merge with an unnamed London counterpart, and the stakes are existential; if the deal doesn’t go through, explains partner Marty Bach—played by none other than Sydney Pollack—“we’ll be selling off the goddamn furniture.” (Pollack might well have been talking to himself: his personal shingle Mirage was one of the three production companies behind Michael Clayton, all of which were shuttered or reduced in size in the years on either side of the film’s release.)

In the movie’s opening scene, an army of lawyers gather in a conference room in an office high-rise, trying to get a settlement finished—and any bodies, metaphorical or literal, fully buried—before the merger deadline. The portentous emptiness of the office hallways, the secrecy of the meeting (Bach tells a Journal reporter fishing for info to kiss off), and the manic voice-over monologue of partner Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson) make the scene feels like a prefiguration of the bankruptcy-driven mergers and acquisitions that would ripple through the finance industry the year after the film’s release—a series of all-night negotiations and conferences more literally depicted from the other side of the crisis in the 2011 financial thriller Margin Call.

Somebody might get rich from this deal, but it isn’t our titular hero (George Clooney); in fact, he’s worried it will end his career and leave him without protection, another casualty of a shifting economic environment, “trying to explain what the hell it is I do around here.” Unlike the Foxes and McDeeres of early-period corporate thrillers, Clayton isn’t a bushy-tailed young naif but a greying fixer. Those conspiracies that our heroes uncover in The Firm and Antitrust? That’s the kind of thing Clayton is paid to cover up. He’s there to keep business orderly and functioning, one bribe, bail bond, or called-in favor at a time. As he tells a client early in the movie, “I’m not a miracle-worker. I’m a janitor. The math on this is simple. The smaller the mess, the easier it is for me to clean up.” (Tony Gilroy, making his directorial debut at fifty, could probably relate, having become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated script doctors in the years since The Devil’s Advocate.)

The mess, in this case, involves an agrochemical giant called U-North, facing a class-action lawsuit over toxic pesticides. Edens, overseeing the U-North defense, has diligently protected his client from accountability. But the constant stress that accompanies years of concealment and rationalization has broken him, and Edens can no longer live with himself. “Am I just some freak organism that’s been put here to eat and sleep and spend my days defending this one horrific chain of carcinogenic molecules?” he asks Clayton, his former protégé. After he steals an incriminating memo and threatens to release it, Clayton is tasked with tracking him down and cleaning up.

Michael Clayton

The feeling that dominates Michael Clayton is one of stress and urgency, contraction and imminent implosion, fissures showing in a previously stable world. Edens, once a master of compartmentalization and billable stability, has cracked wide open in a manic eruption of guilt and shame. Clayton’s brother has fallen off the wagon; the restaurant they started together has gone bankrupt. He owes a loan shark $75,000, but the partners are trying to play hardball on his new contract. Clayton knows they’re pulling up the ladder and he’s going to be left behind with only his debts—along with any liability he’s incurred as a bagman to the rich and powerful.

Clayton was not the only person coming to terms with an increasingly unsustainable world. By the fall of 2007, the party, such as it had been, was nearly over, in Hollywood as in the U.S. economy as a whole. The subprime mortgage crisis was in full swing; the credit crunch was beginning; and the structural debts incurred by two decades of deregulation, financialization, and stratification were coming due.

The presence of Pollack, drawing on memories of his turn as the sinister gatekeeper Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), suggests that Michael Clayton might be seen as The Firm from the other side of the Great Moderation—a lawyerly conspiracy, but not one where a recent grad uncovers the corruption he didn’t realize existed. Instead, Clayton is a veteran fixer admitting to himself the true nature of the world he’s been living in: decades of greed, fraud, compromise, and cover-up. Maintaining one’s position on the inside of corporate America requires a heavy dose of self-deception too. That’s why even an insider as seasoned as Clayton can find himself slipping back into the naivete of a Bud Fox. As Pollack, playing Clayton’s shrewd, compromised boss, tells him: “Fifteen years in I gotta tell you how we pay the rent?”

The Criterion Channel’s May 2026 Lineup

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 06:15:00 +0000

Channel Calendars

This May, take a peek at movie history through the prism of the ’80s: our collection of the decade’s best remakes and the originals that inspired them reveals an era of wild reinventions and sly revisionism. Office Romances collects some of classic Hollywood’s most winning workplace rom-coms, while David Chase’s Adventures in Moviegoing retraces the cinematic education that shaped the creator of The Sopranos. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including the exclusive premiere of Debra Granik’s multipart documentary Conbody vs Everybody, a survey of radical Caribbean filmmaking, spotlights on genre-blending directors Kimi Takesue and the Ross brothers, and Bill Douglas’s landmark trilogy of autobiographical films.

If you haven’t signed up yet, head to CriterionChannel.com and get a 7-day free trial.

*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

Exclusive Premieres

Magellan

Featuring a new introduction by director Lav Diaz, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series

A hypnotic journey engraved in images of staggering beauty and horror, this monumental achievement from acclaimed Filipino auteur Lav Diaz boldly rewrites the imperialist mythmaking of the Age of Discovery. Elegantly minimalist yet overpowering in its scale and impact, Magellan follows the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (Gael García Bernal) as he embarks on his epochal quest to cross the Pacific—a voyage that spirals into zealotry and violence when he attempts to impose Christianity upon the people of the Philippines. Abetted by Bernal’s radically antiheroic portrayal, Diaz composes a stark vision of the brutality at the heart of European conquest and a haunting elegy for a lost precolonial past.

Lumière, le cinéma!

Featuring a new introduction by director Thierry Frémaux, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series

In one of those wonderful coincidences of history, lumière, the French word for “light,” was also the surname of brothers Auguste and Louis, whose brilliant invention, the cinematograph, helped to inaugurate the most beloved art form of the last 130 years. Institut Lumière director Thierry Frémaux uses Lumière, le cinéma! to guide the viewer through over a hundred shorts—some famous, some forgotten, some never before seen—directed by Lumière and company. In the process, Frémaux illuminates how the brothers employed the camera as a creative instrument as they (and their operators) mastered framing, staging, and subject selection for quotidian and exotic microdocumentaries as well as the first ever fictional motion pictures. The result is not only a glorious (re)telling of the genesis of cinema but a profound meditation on the beautiful world captured—and the mysterious world imagined—by the Lumières.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

The Spirit of ’45

Cinematic champion of working-class solidarity Ken Loach (I, Daniel Blake) looks back at the remarkable twentieth-century socialist surge that changed modern Britain forever. Through a vivid mix of interviews and archival footage, Loach brings to life the crucial postwar period that swept Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s insurgent Labour Party into power over Winston Churchill’s Conservative government, inaugurating a sweeping series of reforms—including the nationalization of railways, energy, housing, and health care—that marked the birth of the UK’s welfare state. Connecting the era’s hard-won populist triumphs with their present-day precarity, Loach offers both a stirring celebration of collective power and a sobering reminder of its fragility.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Él (Luis Buñuel, 1953)

Criterion Collection Edition #1289

A newlywed woman discovers that her husband’s charm masks disturbing depths of cruelty and madness in Luis Buñuel’s fascinatingly perverse tale of love gone wrong.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An appreciation by Guillermo del Toro, an interview with Buñuel by writer Jean-Claude Carrière, a video essay on Buñuel, and more.

Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942)

Criterion Collection Edition #867

Newlywed reporters find that love and careers clash in this razor-sharp screwball romance, the first of the iconic pairings between Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director George Stevens, George Stevens Jr., and authors Marilyn Ann Moss and Claudia Roth Pierpont; and feature-length documentaries on Stevens and Tracy.

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942)

Criterion Collection Edition #833

Terror lives in the suggestive shadows of this mood-drenched thriller about a woman haunted by a curse that turns her into a feline killer.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by film historian Gregory Mank, the documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows, an interview with director Jacques Tourneur, and more.

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

Criterion Collection Edition #849

Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant play a recently divorced journalist couple brought back together in the newsroom in one of the fastest, funniest, and most quotable films ever made.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Howard Hawks and film scholar David Bordwell, featurettes about Hawks and Russell, a radio adaptation of the film, and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Directed by Kimi Takesue: Crossings and Encounters

The visually mesmerizing and deeply reflective films of Kimi Takesue traverse genres—including documentary, fiction, and experimental forms—to explore the charged spaces between observer and observed. Often centered on the act of travel, Takesue’s work follows tourists and locals as they navigate shared yet unequal terrain. In evocative shorts and acclaimed features like Where Are You Taking Me?, 95 and 6 to Go, and Onlookers, she turns an unblinking lens on cross-cultural encounters, revealing the subtle tensions, curiosities, and power dynamics that shape how we see and are seen across differences. Through her immersive long takes, Takesue invites audiences into moments of intimacy and unease that continually challenge our assumptions.

FEATURES: Where Are You Taking Me? (2010), 95 and 6 to Go (2016), Onlookers (2023)

SHORTS: Bound (1995), Rosewater (1999), Heaven’s Crossroad (2002), Summer of the Serpent (2004), E=NYC2 (2005), Suspended (2009), That Which Once Was (2011), Looking for Adventure (2013)

Three by the Ross Brothers

Flowing freely between documentary and performance, the richly impressionistic films of brothers Bill and Turner Ross are wonders of regional American filmmaking made according to an unwavering philosophy: to be completely present in the moment and alive to the ecstatic humanity that passes before their camera. Whether capturing the rhythms of life along the Texas-Mexico border (Western), the vibrant tradition of color guard (Contemporary Color), or the bleary-eyed last night in a Las Vegas dive bar (Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets), their films are vital records of a living, breathing Americana that approaches the mythic.

FEATURING: Western (2015), Contemporary Color (2016), Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (2020)

The Bill Douglas Trilogy

Composed in stark, black-and-white images of working-class poetry that have the elemental power of silent cinema, these three works by Bill Douglas are among the most miraculous achievements of British independent film. Based on Douglas’s own hardscrabble upbringing in a postwar Scottish mining village, the Trilogy traces the coming of age of a boy named Jamie (Stephen Archibald) as he contends with poverty, neglect, and emotional isolation before a life-changing friendship sets him on a new path. Tempering harsh reality with moments of tenderness and unexpected lyricism, Douglas crafts an indelible vision of a soul blossoming in the most unforgiving of circumstances.

FEATURING: My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973), My Way Home (1978)

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Clockwatchers

Four temp workers stuck in cubicle hell find their friendship tested by the pressures of the capitalist rat race in this brilliantly deadpan satire of corporate malaise.

ANIME

*K-On! The Movie**

Five high school bandmates make music and memories on a life-changing trip to London in this charming, heartfelt ode to friendship and growing up.

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Queen Bee

Joan Crawford delivers a ferocious performance in this scorching domestic melodrama as a Southern socialite who rules her friends and family with an iron fist.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

An Unfinished Film

Reality and fiction blur to dizzying, emotionally gripping effect when a film crew reunites to finish a long-abandoned project—only to be locked down at the start of COVID-19.

Daughter’s Daughter

After a tragedy leaves her as the guardian of her late daughter’s frozen embryo, a woman must confront both her past and future in this elegantly emotional exploration of motherhood and regret.

Maya, Give Me a Title

The limitless imagination of cinematic dream-spinner Michel Gondry is unleashed in a series of lovingly handmade animated adventures inspired by his daughter’s prompts.

DOCUMENTARIES

The Shepherd and the Bear

The reintroduction of brown bears into a traditional shepherding community sparks conflict high amid the majestic French Pyrenees in an immersive, folkloric documentary.

*Riotsville, U.S.A.**

Using training footage of Army-built model towns called “Riotsvilles,” this acclaimed documentary offers a poetic and furious reflection on the rebellions of the 1960s—and the machine that worked to destroy them.

Tokyo Trial

Assembled from over nine hundred reels of archival footage, this monumental documentary from the great Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri) examines the prosecution of Japanese war crimes and the fraught, often elusive pursuit of justice.

House of Cardin

This lively portrait chronicles the rise and global influence of visionary designer Pierre Cardin, whose space-age chic designs propelled fashion into the future.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Premiering May 1 in Stunts!: Point Break

An FBI agent (Keanu Reeves) goes undercover as a surfer to catch a band of bank-robbing wave-chasers in the most ecstatically adrenalized cult classic of the 1990s.

Premiering May 1 in Directed by Sean Baker: Four Letter Words

Sean Baker’s feature debut raises the bar for the indie hangout movie with an acerbic, hilarious portrait of young men unwilling to jettison the raucous immaturity of adolescence.

Trouble in Paradise: Pure Style

Farran Smith Nehme — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 15:57:00 +0000

Consider, for a moment, the jewel thief. No, not like the gang that, at the time of this writing, recently robbed the Louvre in Paris, France. Think rather of one you might find in Paris, Paramount. After all, as director Ernst Lubitsch once quipped, “I’ve been to Paris, France, and I’ve been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount.” Jewel thieves in movies have near-magic abilities. Undetected, they can pluck a watch from a pocket and glide a diamond brooch right off a rich lady’s poitrine. These criminal artistes need no firearms as they mingle with the wealthy and unwary. Their weapons are perfect table manners, party-ready wit, chic wardrobes, and fluency in some extra languages just in case. The male variety—bold as a pirate and even more seductive—is wont to slip into a lady’s bedroom, primed to make ardent love to her should the lady awaken while he’s robbing her blind.

Do such creatures exist in real life? Thieves certainly do. Thieves with such suave personae, not so much. But why should that matter to any dealer in Hollywood fantasy, much less Lubitsch? In his 1932 masterpiece Trouble in Paradise, Lubitsch gives us gleeful crooks Lily Vautier (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall), along with their not-so-dumb mark, the lavishly rich Mariette Colet (Kay Francis). Like so many Lubitsch characters, these three are the smartest people in the room. The other poor saps in the story try to figure out what hit them.

Lubitsch understood and respected fantasy. Born to a successful tailor in Berlin, he could have made a good living in his father’s trade, but young Ernst dreamed of theater marquees. Even as his father tried to teach him the clothing business, Lubitsch enrolled in drama school. His path took him to stage acting and, eventually, the burgeoning German film industry. There he continued to act, eventually moving into both writing and, most significantly, directing. Lubitsch journeyed from Berlin to Hollywood in 1922 at the behest of Mary Pickford, to direct her in Rosita. The movie is charming, but it was an experience that neither director nor star enjoyed. He rapidly found his footing, however, with films such as a silent adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan (1925) so brilliant that audiences barely missed Oscar Wilde’s dialogue from the original play.

When sound came in, Lubitsch reached new heights with his musicals—sprightly, charming, and as suggestive as he could get away with. Having signed another contract with Paramount, the studio where he’d always felt most at home, in 1932 Lubitsch embarked on a fresh era of “comedies without music,” as the critic and playwright James Harvey called them. None would turn out more polished, more flippant, more bracingly adult than Trouble in Paradise.

From its opening frames, the film proclaims the director’s originality. Even back in 1932, a Venetian gondolier with a great singing voice was a common trope. Lubitsch gives us a gondolier who is also the local garbage collector, belting “O sole mio” while taking out the trash. Shortly afterward, we find our expectations flipped again, as a thief jumps from a balcony and runs away—dressed not in some sort of all-black burglar getup but in a well-tailored suit. Then the camera glides back into an opulent suite of rooms and comes to rest on the polished shoes of another man, who is clearly out for the count.

That unconscious man is François Filiba (Edward Everett Horton), and later we will discover what all that was about. In the meantime, most audiences find their Trouble in Paradise bliss just a scene or two later, when Lily, in a stunning lamé evening gown, sweeps in for her rendezvous with Gaston. This will take place—most improperly, but for the time being the censors were taking it easy—in his hotel room. Gaston has donned formal wear and prepared the most perfect dinner for two that money can buy. Other people’s money, that is. That was also Gaston we saw earlier, making away with the wallet of François, “the gentleman in 253, -5, -7, and -9.”

And Lily, after striking some poses and loudly wondering what the local nobility will think of their indiscretion, pinches that very wallet, only to gracefully hand it over when Gaston announces that he’s on to her. Gaston, in turn, gives back to Lily the jeweled pin she wore near her neckline when she came in.

She says, “I like you, Baron”—for Gaston has also helped himself to a title—and returns his watch. We realize this is a contest, and we’re at the finale. Gaston asks if he can keep her garter, holding it up for her to see. Lily feels her leg . . . and practically leaps into his arms.

The scene is so perfectly, deliciously Lubitsch it almost hurts to watch—to wonder, as filmmaker and writer Peter Bogdanovich put it, how America could ever have been that witty, that sophisticated. One answer is that, as always, Lubitsch added a great deal of European worldliness to his American movies. According to Lubitsch biographer Scott Eyman, Trouble in Paradise was loosely based on the Hungarian play The Honest Finder by Aladár László, though Lubitsch said it was “bad” and saw it as just “material.” In fact, when Lubitsch told his screenwriting partner Samson Raphaelson the idea for the project, he didn’t even bring “Rafe” a copy.

The screenplay was supposed to be a whodunit, a form Lubitsch and Raphaelson knew nothing about. Contract writer Grover Jones was called in to help adapt László, but he wasn’t much needed. The script carries echoes of Georges Manolescu, a real-life self-styled master thief whose 1907 memoir had already been made into two silent films. The crooked hero’s name, Gaston Monescu, was deliberately close enough to ring a bell with many. (There are key differences, however. For one thing, if Gaston has ever been caught before, we do not hear about it, unlike with Manolescu, who spent his life in and out of prison—as well as the occasional insane asylum, the thief perhaps having discovered that faking insanity was one way to get out of jail.)

So they fashioned a Lubitsch-Raphaelson version of a whodunit, one that lets you know who-dun-what at nearly every turn. One of Lubitsch’s many gifts, part of his much-publicized “touch,” is that of revealing plot points in ways that make the audience feel like coconspirators. We see that Lily and Gaston are made for each other in one shot at the end of the hotel scene, as they embrace on a couch, then magically dissolve into a night and a life together. They may not be married, but they are a formidable pair, and a short while later a radio reporter confirms it: “From Geneva comes the news that the famous international crook Gaston Monescu robbed the peace conference yesterday. He took practically everything except the peace.”

Soon, the couple land in Paris, and now trouble finds them in the person of Mme Colet, the heiress to a perfume fortune. Her wealth is detailed in another montage—the commercial break for that radio story about Gaston—that shows off the art deco mastery of Paramount designer Hans Dreier. His sets for the Colet offices and duplex are all mirrored surfaces and swooping steel trim; even the “Colet et Cie” lettering echoes the era’s ads for the luxe French perfume brand Caron.

Mariette Colet is extravagant, spending a mint on a single jeweled evening bag, but she surely wins some hearts by cheerfully telling her gray-bearded board of directors that no, she won’t be cutting her workers’ salaries. This marks her as a good egg, especially in the bleakest part of the Depression. But at first her good nature can’t protect her from Gaston, who steals the bag, of course. Then, with fantastic chutzpah, he arrives at Mariette’s digs to claim the twenty-thousand-franc reward she has offered for its return.

Still, isn’t there more to be had from such a pigeon, especially one as lovely as Mariette? (Kay Francis was never more beautiful than in this movie, her majestic looks set off by Travis Banton’s costumes.) Another flirtation ensues, even naughtier than the earlier one with Lily. Gaston rebukes Mme Colet for poor business decisions (she isn’t storing enough cash in the safe he already plans to rob). Gaston tells her that if he were in charge, “I would give you a good spanking. In a business way, of course.” Mariette, entranced, asks slyly, “What would you do if you were my secretary?” “The same thing,” he replies. With a feline smile, she leans back and says, “You’re hired.”

What can Gaston do but fall in love with Mariette as well? It’s all played with gossamer lightness, yet there is real feeling in the farce, as when Mariette tries to leave for a party, and Gaston tries to let her go, and they open and close their bedroom doors as their attraction wars with their other motives. Meanwhile, a suspicious and forlorn Lily must wait and worry and scheme. If Trouble in Paradise has a flaw, it’s the sidelining of Lily for too long in the second half.

By way of compensating for less Lily, there’s Horton’s Filiba, racking his soft little brain trying to remember where he saw Gaston; and Charles Ruggles, the best throat-clearer in the business, as the major. Both are unpromising suitors for the hand of Mme Colet, and they deeply resent each other’s company: “You’re looking fine, Major,” says Filiba. “Now see here, my good man, I’ve had just about enough of your insulting remarks,” retorts the major. Skulking around elsewhere, determined to keep control of Mme Colet and her company, is the extremely British C. Aubrey Smith as Giron.

Smith, of course, was not the only Englishman in the cast. London-born Herbert Marshall had gone from British stage and screen to Broadway success and then to Los Angeles, where he stayed and worked for the rest of his life. Tall and stylish, with a voice of resonant beauty, Marshall was known for his manners and grace under pressure. Years after Trouble in Paradise, Bette Davis would be awestruck at Marshall’s unflappable cool through dozens of William Wyler’s takes on the unhappy set of The Little Foxes. What colleagues knew, though most of the public did not, was that Marshall’s composure had been tested by far worse. He took a bullet directly in the knee in World War I. Multiple operations couldn’t save the leg, which was eventually removed below the hip. Both his prosthesis and the phantom pain that can affect amputees gave Marshall difficulty for the rest of his life.

But 1932 was early in his American film career, and he had trained himself to move on camera with a near-glide. Trouble in Paradise, and the urbane Gaston Monescu, helped make Marshall a star as well as a matinee idol—it was “the film which first made the fans passionately Marshall-conscious,” as one magazine put it. Marshall, for his part, deeply admired Lubitsch: “There is not one thing—not one detail—about acting that Lubitsch does not know.”

As Gaston, Marshall offers both hand-kissing Continental sex appeal and a streak of daring that would not be out of place in a swashbuckler. Witness the moment when, at Mariette’s garden party, Gaston spots Filiba, whom he robbed in Venice. Only a slight tightening of the jaw betrays Gaston’s worry. Then, with perfect sangfroid, Gaston sails across the room to ask Filiba if “we’ve met somewhere before,” thus turning his problem into Filiba’s. Marshall even adds the faintest suggestion of a bow, increasing Filiba’s discomfort.

Miriam Hopkins shared Marshall’s high opinion of their director; her second feature film had been Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant in 1931. Famous for her meddling on sets (“Helpful Hopkins” was one nickname), she nevertheless worked well with Lubitsch, who spoke fondly of the volatile actress to the end of his life. Film Lovers Annual called her work as Lily “the highlight of her Hollywood career.” Hopkins would be the apex of another love triangle in Lubitsch’s next film, Design for Living.

Alas for Kay Francis, however, this was the only Lubitsch movie she would make. It wasn’t for lack of admiration. Francis was already getting a star buildup, being cast in film after film in the early 1930s, including hits like Raffles and Girls About Town—and 1932 would, incredibly, also include the releases of Jewel Robbery and One Way Passage. She was offered Mariette Colet as she packed for a delayed honeymoon in Europe with husband number three. She chose Lubitsch, and a good thing, too—Francis, whose “women’s pictures” were often dismissed by the mass of largely male critics, got stellar reviews for her work in Trouble in Paradise, one writer calling her “the perfect Lubitsch heroine.” It’s a shame that she never worked with him again, or indeed at Paramount. One reason was reportedly that she was displeased with her billing, below that of Hopkins.

Trouble in Paradise itself got good reviews but not all the raves its later reputation would suggest. All too soon, its admirers also had to contend with a major obstacle: the Production Code Administration, which in mid-1934 began enforcing the stringent rules that Lubitsch so enjoyed treating as suggestions. Trouble, with its double entendres, its unrepentant thieves, and its intimations of sex, never had a chance with PCA head Joseph Breen. For many years, it was kept off commercial screens and shown only occasionally by film societies and festivals. In the spring of 1947, the year he died, Lubitsch himself attended a screening at the invitation of the film club at Rexford, a prep school in Beverly Hills. He was said to be in good spirits afterward. Lubitsch knew Trouble in Paradise’s place among his films—among all Hollywood films—was secure.

“As for pure style,” wrote Lubitsch that same year, “I think I have done nothing better or as good as Trouble in Paradise.”

Monty Python’s Life of Brian: The Wrong Messiah

Bilge Ebiri — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:17:00 +0000

Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) is a film about fear. That may not entirely jibe with its reputation as a biblical parody, but it might be the movie’s secret strength—why it continues to strike a nerve today. Many of its best lines have been quoted to a nub, the result of the film being incessantly rewatched in college dorms and its jokes being recycled in other media. And yet Life of Brian still works marvelously, because running through it is an overwhelming sense of true horror, at both the cruelty of the ancient world it depicts and the psychological terror of finding oneself constantly under the judgmental scrutiny of others—be they haughty soldiers, scolding mothers, or worshipful disciples. The film plays like a nightmare an anxious teenager might have had after reading the Bible and imagining walking in Jesus’s sandals.

A peculiar adolescent delirium was always evident in Monty Python’s work. The troupe had its roots in the hallowed halls of Cambridge and Oxford: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Eric Idle met as students at the former, Terry Jones and Michael Palin at the latter. (Terry Gilliam, the American, was the odd man out.) Their sketch-comedy routines—popularized by their television work and their first feature, the microbudget Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), often relied on juxtaposing ostensibly serious subjects and material (Arthurian legends, wartime generals, police officers, intellectual talk shows, investigative TV reports) with a slashing, anything-goes irreverence that encompassed everything from Dadaist interventions to outright juvenilia. The Pythons gleefully demolished any convention or dogma that stood in their path, and their refusal to grow up came as a balm as the sixties gave way to the seventies.

Even so, on some level, Life of Brian might seem like a slightly more grown-up effort. It’s the first and only Python film that isn’t sketch-based, that attempts to follow a single coherent narrative—at least on the surface. In telling the story of a young Nazarene named Brian (Chapman) who is briefly mistaken at birth for Christ and whose life bears some unfortunate similarities to the Son of God’s, the Pythons pulled out all the sanctified stops, riffing on the three wise men, the Sermon on the Mount, and the stations of the cross. (Notably, they didn’t actually poke fun at Christ himself, or even his teachings; in our one glimpse of him, as he delivers the Sermon on the Mount, he seems like a perfectly solid chap, prompting Gwen Taylor’s very British Mrs. Big Nose to remark, “ ‘Blessed are the meek.’ Oh, that’s nice, isn’t it? I’m glad they’re getting something, ’cause they have a hell of a time.”) Most of the film’s barbs are aimed either at the blind worship of prophets (in this case, false ones) by people who seem incapable of thinking for themselves, or at the bureaucratic and ideological ineptitude of the rebels who claim they want to liberate the world from such oppression.

This satirical approach to religion led to the film’s being declared blasphemous in some quarters at the time of its release, though it’s worth noting that, in the seventies, playful riffs on the Bible were not entirely unheard-of; Jesus Christ Superstar had been a hit on both stage and screen a few years earlier. Mel Brooks’s History of the World, Part I would come out just two years after Life of Brian. And the Pythons had already mocked religion in Holy Grail. The film’s director, Jones, would say, years later, of Brian’s supposed blasphemy: “It felt a bit like kicking a dead horse because no one was going to church then. I mean, attendances were really down to almost zero.”

Nevertheless, the film made headlines with its scandal. Certainly, in the U.S., the Christian right, looking to seize on cultural moments in an effort to raise its profile and fill its coffers, took aim at the movie. (They’d find a far more visible target a full decade later, with Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.) When Cleese and Palin famously went to defend their work on the BBC program Friday Night, Saturday Morning, they were befuddled by their clueless adversaries, who seemed uninterested in debating Scripture or the role of satire in a free society. Screening the film was forbidden in Ireland, Norway, and parts of the United Kingdom. And yet, for all that, most of the controversy had died away after a couple of years. By the early eighties, the movie was regularly broadcast on television, and almost nobody complained.

What makes Life of Brian so resonant isn’t its treatment of religion but its casual approach to the unspeakable horrors of its world. The offhandedness speaks to the film’s real disgust, evident in several moments throughout: the bodies of slaves and gladiators lying in pieces on a coliseum floor; the slapstick spectacle of a stoning, in which merely uttering the word Jehovah produces an immediate hail of rocks, no matter the speaker; the almost industrial efficiency of crucifixion, with a patient bureaucrat (Palin) politely confirming the fate of each of the condemned before sending all of them off to march through the streets of Jerusalem.

Yes, it’s a goofy comedy. No, it’s not really meant to be taken seriously. And yes, the fact that the Pythons are playing most of the parts (including most of the female ones) and showing up repeatedly in different personae lends an additional distance to the material. Regardless, one wants to scream in outrage while watching Life of Brian. Maybe that’s why the charming closing song, “Bright Side of Life,” cheerily sung by a group of men hanging on crosses, hits so hard—because there is obviously no bright side.

The Pythons had certainly been here before. Holy Grail’s depiction of a witch trial, with a pious inquisitor calmly declaring that a woman will be sentenced to death as a witch if she floats in a pool of water (and declared innocent if she merely sinks to the bottom and drowns), remains one of its most cutting sequences. Despite their fondness for wild flights of surrealism, the troupe’s comedy always worked best when it spoke to something familiar, to prevalent attitudes and cultural prejudices and common behaviors. Though witch trials weren’t common in the seventies, there was at the time something quite raw and poignant about the hilariously matter-of-fact, damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t insanity of the aforementioned sequence. There still is.

The Pythons were always great at channeling the anxieties of the prep-school set; that unease lies at the heart of many of their best bits. Watch the pure terror on Brian’s face when he is discovered one night attempting to paint “Romans go home” on a wall. The hectoring centurion (Cleese) who catches him begins to correct Brian on his poor Latin and starts quizzing him on verb tenses and word choices. As the scene goes on and the lesson gets more intense, Brian becomes even more frightened. This is no longer a foiled resistance operation; it’s a very, very bad day in Latin class, which in this film’s vision is more terrifying than getting caught red-handed by the Romans in an act of terrorism.

So many of the episodes in Brian’s life play like boyhood terrors. He finds out his father wasn’t his father after all. He finds himself unwittingly taking the place of a wannabe prophet and struggling to come up with coherent things to say, as the small crowd starts expressing its doubt and disapproval. Then, when he leaves a sentence unfinished, that same crowd becomes convinced that he’s actually holding back secret wisdom and that he is a prophet, chasing him through the streets and obsessively hanging on his every word. Every step of the way, Brian finds himself incapable of dealing with the rules of the world around him. A hilarious bit with a market seller (Idle) who chastises him for not haggling over the price of a fake beard (and, later, a free gourd) is another inspired bit of Pythonesque lunacy, built as it is on a weaponized politeness that these oh-so-British comedians always portrayed so brilliantly.

This through line of anxiety and outrage powers the film. Jones (directing solo, after codirecting Holy Grail with Gilliam) leans into the idea of the fever dream by frequently shooting in close-up, bringing his camera into Chapman’s wide-eyed, terrified face. That may sound like a simple directorial move, but it’s a far cry from the comic tableaux of Holy Grail, which often relies on the slapstick spectacle of the Pythons decked out as knights, knocking coconuts together to imitate their absent horses, or on sudden bursts of unexpected and uncalled-for acts of violence. Life of Brian had a larger budget and more cinematic ambition—it was shot in Tunisia, on some of the sets used in Franco Zeffirelli’s miniseries Jesus of Nazareth—but it’s a much more internalized film than any other Python project. Despite the troupe’s fondness for pantomime and their cavalier attitude toward narrative logic, this picture actually dares to explore its protagonist’s psychology. Brian is a relatable character, an almost modern figure lost in a mad, archaic world. Gilliam himself would riff on Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with his films Time Bandits (1981) and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018); one can detect a similar sensibility at work here.

The troupe’s roles feel more carefully suited to their personae this time, and that adds to the film’s curious power. Chapman brings to Brian the same everyman appeal he brought to King Arthur, but he laces it with a feverish innocence; Jones is wonderfully brusque as Brian’s surly, suspicious mom. Cleese’s many roles make fine use of his ability to portray parodies of leadership: he’s the strident high priest leading the stoning; the fussy Roman captain; and Reg, the smug head of the People’s Front of Judea. Palin, with his thin lips and wide mouth, always brings a deliciously submissive quality to his parts, which makes him perfect for playing the feckless Pontius Pilate, whose inability to pronounce the letter r and subsequent mortification before the populace betray a lack of confidence. Idle always seems to be the hyper-talkative one, going on and on about the size of other people’s noses, the proper way to haggle for a gourd, and the quality of the pricey stones he’s selling; he also plays the annoying jokester among the group of crucified men at the end, as well as the one who starts singing “Bright Side of Life.” Given the chatty nature of Idle’s roles, it feels almost like an in-joke that he also plays a jailer’s assistant with a paralyzing stutter.

Life of Brian’s clarity and consistency help explain its longevity. But perhaps one other element contributes to Brian’s staying power—one of its most timely (and, since the film is now more than forty-five years old, timeless) bits. Amid all its outrage, the movie saves some of its most vicious barbs for the sad state of organizations that pretend to pursue meaningful change. When we first see the People’s Front of Judea, they bicker about their differences with the Judean People’s Front and the Judean Popular People’s Front. Later, they argue over meetings and resolutions and arcane word choices. They spout ideology but can’t actually do anything. They claim to be activists, but they never act—they’re all language and paperwork and committees. These gags become even funnier—and more harrowing—as the film goes on and we realize that the situation unfolding on-screen really could use a group of heroic revolutionaries to come and save the day. The People’s Front of Judea, alas, turns out to be useless, as do the Judean People’s Front and their “crack suicide squad,” who show up at the last minute in dramatic fashion and . . . well, kill themselves. It might honestly be the funniest moment in the film—as well as the saddest and scariest. Maybe that’s Life of Brian’s true blasphemy: it dares to remind us that we live in a horrible world where nobody is coming to save us.

The Blade: Cutting Deep

Lisa Morton — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:50:00 +0000

In 1995, the year he released The Blade, Tsui Hark was the undisputed king of Hong Kong cinema. A cinematic Renaissance man—he worked as director, producer, screenwriter, and even actor—the ethnic-Chinese native of Vietnam had begun by making documentaries and television before moving to narrative feature films in 1979. With that year’s The Butterfly Murders, a sort of mash-up of martial arts, mystery, and steampunk (before that last genre was even invented), Tsui, ever restless and rebellious, had embarked on a decade-plus of yearly box-office and artistic hits, with which he would de- and then reconstruct genres with astonishing insight and success. His Film Workshop, founded in 1984, had either established or reestablished the careers of luminaries including actors Brigitte Lin, Leslie Cheung, and Chow Yun-fat and directors John Woo and Ching Siu-tung. He’d introduced Hollywood-style special effects into Asian film with Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983) and explored gender in films like Peking Opera Blues (1986) and (as a cowriter and producer) Swordsman II (1992), both starring Lin, a waiflike Taiwanese beauty turned by Tsui into a take-no-prisoners warrior.

In 1994, Tsui had directed The Lovers, a historical romance based on a classic Chinese folktale; the film’s sumptuous imagery and heartfelt performances by Nicky Wu and Charlie Yeung drew audiences throughout Asia and led to numerous award nominations. His Lunar New Year comedy The Chinese Feast (1995) was his most financially successful project to that point. His second release of that year, the romance–sci-fi hybrid Love in the Time of Twilight, was a more modest success but earned praise for its twisting time-travel plot and use of special effects. Tsui could have chosen any material for his next film. The Blade was certainly not what anyone would have expected.

Violently nihilistic, simultaneously energizing and crushing, The Blade is a 180-degree turn from anything Tsui had made since his third feature, Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind (1980), a film so brutal in its depiction of contemporary Hong Kong youth that its first cut was banned by colonial censors. If that film (as critic Law Kar noted) “brims with accusation and subversion,” The Blade explodes with frantic anxiety. Although based on Chang Cheh’s 1967 classic One-Armed Swordsman, The Blade captures the zeitgeist of a Hong Kong caught between the 1989 June 4 incident (known in the West as the Tiananmen Square massacre) and the 1997 handover, when Hong Kong would relinquish its status as a British colony and become China’s HKSAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region). The treaty that negotiated the return of Hong Kong to China had included the provision that its basic system of government would remain unchanged for fifty years, but many Hong Kong residents had already chosen to leave the region rather than stay to see how that played out. The Blade, with its recurring images of refugees fleeing ahead of the marauding hordes of outlaws preying on their towns and villages, expresses the uneasiness with which those who remained awaited whatever and whoever might be coming next.

Taking on a remake of One-Armed Swordsman would have been audacious no matter when it was done. Not only had that film been the first to earn over a million Hong Kong dollars in domestic ticket sales but it also signaled a departure from the women’s themes (and star actresses) then dominant in Hong Kong cinema. Chang, who had begun his career as a critic, proposed returning yanggang, or masculinity, to the region’s films, and One-Armed Swordsman focuses on male-oriented concerns of honor and rivalry.

Inspired in part by Akira Kurosawa’s work (as Tsui was for The Blade), One-Armed Swordsman introduced a new style of wuxia (martial-arts) movie, one that was far bloodier and that relied on the charisma of its male star, Jimmy Wang Yu. Playing like a classic American western, the mythically simple plot leaves little room for subtlety or nuance: A poor, orphaned martial-arts student, trying to leave the school after years of being bullied by his wealthy classmates, has his arm cut off by the master’s daughter in the ambush that ensues. He escapes, is nursed back to health by a beautiful peasant woman, and eventually masters a new form of swordplay. Chang’s yanggang is front and center; men in his films exist to either bond with the hero or fight against him, and women provide either the pivotal betrayal or emotional support.

When Tsui conceived of remaking the film, he decided to keep the basic plot, but with one major twist: his story would be told from the point of view of the master’s daughter. This approach allowed Tsui to cast a critical eye on the proceedings; his Siu Ling is perplexed by her male cohorts’ behavior, to the point that she follows and studies them. From the beginning of The Blade, she expresses bafflement over the concept of jianghu, a feeling undoubtedly shared by many Western viewers. Jianghu, which translates literally as “the river and the lake,” is at the heart of martial-arts stories; it means the philosophy of honorable warriors standing up against the malicious and powerful. In classic Chinese novels like The Water Margin, from the Ming dynasty, jianghu involves stealing from the rich and redistributing their wealth, which is how the term came to refer to criminal societies like the Chinese triads. The concept also embodies ideas of hermetic solitude, since the jianghu hero might end up retreating to the rivers and the lakes to live alone.

Discussing his take on jianghu in a 2009 interview, Tsui noted, “One usually thinks of brotherhood, a sense of obligation and such things, when the term comes up . . . The jianghu of the martial-arts film is a murky pool of water full of deceit, factional rivalries, and blind allegiances . . . Jianghu in the martial-arts world also allows us to examine the human conflicts that result from the expression of selfishness and ambition.” Both Chang and Tsui use their story to reflect on the “selfishness and ambition” of the other students at the school—as well as that of the outlaws who attacked the school in the past, killing the one-armed swordsman’s father—but Tsui also tackles those qualities in all his male characters.

The Blade begins with young Siu Ling (Song Lei), the naive daughter of the head of a sword foundry, cuddling a kitten while, in voice-over, she ponders the meaning of jianghu. Meanwhile, a group of men in the village outside lure a dog into a trap, laughing when the steel jaws close around its leg. (Tsui had used animals before to juxtapose innocence with psychosis; see—but be warned!—the beginning of Dangerous Encounters of the First Kind.) In this way, the movie signals from the start that the real world of martial arts is full of sadism and casual cruelty, not the nobility and fortitude depicted in earlier films. The Blade subverts yanggang films’ usual obsession with male bodies in states of extreme physical exertion by having Siu Ling stare at the relaxed, naked foundrymen while they bathe and horse around after work (thus also upending both Chang’s homoeroticism and the cinematic trope of the male gaze). Later, Tsui shows the men’s nude backsides again, but now striped with blood as they’re disciplined by the foundry’s master (Austin Wai), which undercuts the earlier eroticism.

The Blade settles into a style that borrows liberally from horror cinema. After the grisly opening scene, the same bandits torment a woman, who is then saved by a monk skilled in kung fu, in the film’s first major fight. Tsui alternates between a handheld camera and high overhead shots that allow us to observe the action at length, with quick takes of panicked animals and a pan over a cart full of carved demonic heads, leaving little doubt that this world is ferocious and frightening—especially after the bandits ultimately mount the slain monk’s head on a pole.

The film’s revenge plot is set in motion when the hero, Ding On (Vincent Zhao), learns the truth about the death of his father by overhearing Siu Ling discussing it; the man was murdered when Ding On was a baby by the tattooed assassin Flying Dragon (Xiong Xin-xin). Furious at having been denied this knowledge before, Ding On bursts from the gloom to confront Siu Ling, in a scene of high-contrast red-and-black lighting backed with a soundtrack of howling wind. In The Blade, truth revealed is not some high-minded ideal but one more example of the dreadful secrets life can hold.

Intent on tracking down Flying Dragon, Ding On steals his father’s broken blade (the title character, as it were) and leaves the foundry. Siu Ling goes after him but encounters the bandits lying in wait in a bamboo scaffolding, surrounded by shadows and smoke. Siu Ling’s horse is ensnared, she is thrown, and the bandits advance, their intentions clear . . . until Ding On intervenes. The fight that follows is a maelstrom of action, using Tsui’s trademark fast editing (he coedited The Blade), cutting between shots of rushing bodies and close-ups of grimacing faces. When Ding On loses his arm, the light goes scarlet for a few seconds, but the worst is yet to come: In the film’s single most excruciating scene—and perhaps its fullest excoriation of jianghu—Ding On races after his severed arm as the bandit leader drags it away. When Ding On catches up to his opponent, he finishes him off not with a heroic blow but by tearing the man’s throat out with his teeth.

The remainder of The Blade is driven largely by the actions of two women: Siu Ling, who goes in search of Ding On after he vanishes, and Black Head (Chung Bik-ha), the capering, impish farmer who nurses him back to health and provides him with the manual that lets him gain skill as a one-armed swordsman. Black Head—who can perhaps best be described in today’s terms as nonbinary—is another example of Tsui’s interest in exploring gender. Although not as powerful or charismatic as Brigitte Lin’s transgender Asia the Invincible from Film Workshop’s Swordsman II and The East Is Red (a.k.a. Swordsman III, 1993), Black Head is The Blade’s most intriguing character—determined to survive by hard work but compassionate enough to form a strong bond with Ding On. Siu Ling, meanwhile, is finally forced to take up the sword herself when her mission to find Ding On becomes more dangerous. “I hate myself for knowing that I was nothing” before, she tells us. As Siu Ling and Black Head, Song’s and Chung’s performances counterbalance the masculine violence with moments of compassion and playfulness; their presence provides a necessary relief from the film’s otherwise unrelenting bleakness.

In her travels, Siu Ling (with her guide, Iron Head, played by Moses Chan) encounters the harsh realities of life outside the safety of the foundry, learning about misogyny, sex (in an inn that also serves as a brothel), male jealousy (Iron Head gets into a fight over a sex worker), and violent oppression (as bandits constantly descend on towns and settlements). Meanwhile, Ding On trains (to a soundtrack driven by wild percussion and vocal grunts)—while surviving with Black Head and killing other outlaws—until he’s ready to take on Flying Dragon.

For the climactic fight, Tsui uses many of the tropes of the traditional, Shaw Brothers–era martial-arts film: slow motion, fast zooms into faces, spurting blood, whooshing sound effects. His two leads, Vincent Zhao and Xiong Xin-xin, were both champion martial artists before moving into acting, and both had worked with Tsui before; Zhao had even been chosen to replace Jet Li in Tsui’s Once Upon a Time in China series (1991–94) as the historic hero Wong Fei-hung. Given their skills, the fight is acrobatic and even surprisingly graceful, sometimes more like dancing than lethal combat; but Tsui also cuts back to Siu Ling, watching the fight and contemplating her own revenge. The fight ends with both men whirling their blades on chains as Flying Dragon continues to taunt Ding On. The camera and editing are sometimes dizzying in their speed and motion. “It is not meant to be seen clearly,” Tsui said of the action in The Blade. “The fighting is but fleeting impressions.”

After Flying Dragon is finally vanquished, the victorious Ding On departs with Black Head. Siu Ling is left to spend the rest of her life alone in the abandoned foundry. In the last shots of The Blade, she’s old and silver-haired, still pondering the meaning of jianghu, though also acknowledging that it doesn’t really matter.

Although it is now regarded as one of Tsui’s best movies and frequently appears on lists of the greatest action films ever made, The Blade performed poorly at the box office in its initial release, a failure Tsui blamed on the film’s lack of major stars (despite the fine, intense performances, especially from Zhao). Perhaps the real reason is that local audiences, already feeling the pressure of the coming handover, weren’t ready for a film that both deconstructed a beloved Hong Kong movie staple and expressed their collective anxiety at the prospect of incoming hordes. Fortunately, The Blade has found a new global life in the twenty-first century, when perhaps we have the perspective to appreciate its bleak yet exhilarating brilliance.

A Man and a Woman: Modern Lovers

Carrie Rickey — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:38:00 +0000

The nouvelle vague, the storied French New Wave, made reputations. Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Agnès Varda were among the mavericks who established their careers between the late 1950s, when the wave began, and 1963, when it started to subside. In the uncertain period of the mid-1960s, two young auteurs became household names and their passion projects international successes.

In a glowing review of Claude Lelouch’s 1966 breakout hit, A Man and a Woman, critic Gilles Jacob (later the longtime president of the Cannes Film Festival) affectionately dubbed the movie Under the Umbrellas of Deauville, implying its kinship with Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical romance, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Both films exalted first love but pragmatically suggested that it might not last, and that there was a way of moving forward in its wake.

Demy’s film, set in the port city of Cherbourg, concerns the relationship between a young garage mechanic and a shopgirl, who are cruelly separated when the former is sent to fight in France’s war in Algeria. The Lelouch is about sexy Parisians with sexy jobs, a race-car driver and a film continuity supervisor, who have been cruelly sundered from their spouses. Both are single parents, each with a child at a boarding school in the upscale resort town of Deauville.

Before the release of A Man and a Woman, Lelouch was a stranger to success. His early films were savaged by cineastes and the popular press. “Claude Lelouch, remember this name well, because you’ll never hear it again,” snarked Cahiers du cinéma in covering his rookie feature, Le propre de l’homme (1961), in which he also played the male lead.

The child of an Algerian Jew and a Frenchwoman from Normandy, Lelouch was born in Paris in 1937. Younger than France’s New Wave cohort, he cheekily said of its filmmakers that they “showed me everything I don’t want to do.”

He also said that films saved his life, and he meant it literally as well as figuratively. During Germany’s World War II occupation of France, when the Gestapo was arresting Jews, Lelouch’s mother hid Claude in various movie theaters, where the authorities didn’t think to look for him.

When Claude failed to pass his baccalaureate exams, his father gave him his own 16 mm camera. This encouraged him to pursue a career not requiring a college diploma. His film school was the French army’s cinematographic unit, where he covered both military and general news during the Algerian War. In the army, he also documented sporting events such as the Tour de France and the twenty-four-hour Le Mans automobile race (the latter a significant plotline in A Man and a Woman).

Lelouch went on to form his own production company, Les Films 13, financing his films independently, with money from other endeavors, and making them fast and economically. His documentary experience had prepared him to be a matter-of-fact chronicler of events, preferring real, unembellished locations to art-directed sets. This approach has the effect of focusing audience attention on the characters.

When I first saw A Man and a Woman, with my parents, I recognized Anne (Anouk Aimée) and Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) as the kinds of professionals that my mother and father might know. The actors lacked the Hollywood artifice (studio lighting, heavy makeup) I had come to expect at the movies. The dialogue seemed improvised (much of it was). It was a foreign film where one reads the eyes of the actors, not the subtitles.

Revisiting A Man and a Woman, I see how it adheres faithfully to the beats of a Hollywood love story yet nonetheless feels sui generis. A significant reason for that is the film’s style—its edgy editing, often suggesting flashback and reflection; its dynamic photography (Lelouch was his own cameraman); and, most radically, its mixing of different film stocks.

While this last part was out of necessity—Lelouch’s modest budget (around $775,000) did not allow him to shoot in color from beginning to end—he had experimented with the expressive possibilities of this technique on his previous features. Here the effect is singularly striking. A Man and a Woman’s exterior scenes are mostly in color, while other sequences are tinted in sepia or gray; still others are in black and white. Is the film effectively color-coded, as some suggest? Closer examination suggests that Lelouch’s use of color is in fact inconsistent—for example, not all of the sepia or gray scenes have the same mood, or are meant to evoke the past. The tonal variations challenge viewers to parse their meaning, attuning them more closely to the subtle changes in the film’s emotional atmosphere.

A Man and a Woman begins in fog and ends in clarity.

Fog blankets the Touques where the river meets the English Channel, dissipating as Anne, a sad-eyed beauty, recounts the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” to her daughter, Françoise. Cut to Jean-Louis, a playful guy, who orders his driver to take him to the golf course. As the camera pans right, it is revealed that his young son, Antoine, is the “chauffeur.”

The day is Sunday, the place is Deauville, the month is December, and the year is 1966. We have met the title characters, but they have not yet met each other. That will soon change, when Anne deposits Françoise at school and misses her train to Paris.

The boarding-school headmistress, aware that Anne is a widow and Jean-Louis a widower, suggests that Anne catch a ride home with Jean-Louis in his cherry-red 1965 Mustang convertible. Both parents are visibly self-conscious, but she is aloof and he outgoing. Obviously attracted to her, he asks whether she is married. She clears her throat without answering. Before long, she explains that she met her stuntman husband, Pierre (frequent Lelouch collaborator Pierre Barouh, who would marry Aimée shortly after making the film), on a movie where she was the script girl, a gendered term for continuity supervisor. She talks about Pierre with such animation that Jean-Louis assumes he is alive.

Shortly afterward, she asks whether he has a wife, then takes a hard look at Jean-Louis. She reckons by his flirty smile that he is single.

There is no “acting” in this Lelouch film, as elliptical and minimalist as one by Robert Bresson. Nor are there characters who speak with audible quotes around their dialogue. In his program notes for a 2024 Lelouch retrospective at the Cinémathèque française, Michaël Lellouche (no relation) wrote that the director “achieves this naturalness by letting the actors play like children, not giving them a script in advance, unsettling them, and observing them until he captures flashes of truth or laughter.” He doesn’t tell them how to walk, eat, or deliver a line. He trusts them to do it the way they’ve done it all their lives.

Once they’re back in Paris, Jean-Louis asks if he can drive Anne and Pierre to Deauville the next weekend. Only then does Jean-Louis learn of Pierre’s accidental death on a movie set. Rather than rely on Anne’s pained recounting, Lelouch wisely shows how it happened in a minute-long flashback. He is a “show, don’t tell” kind of filmmaker.

Some of the most memorable such moments in A Man and a Woman can be linked to other aspects of Lelouch’s résumé. Before embarking on the film, he had directed Scopitones, precursors of music videos, for Dionne Warwick and Sylvie Vartan. These film shorts played on a type of jukebox when the user dropped a coin into the slot. Lelouch financed his features with his earnings from Scopitones and advertising gigs. In A Man and a Woman, when Anne waxes poetic about her late spouse’s enthusiasm for samba, we see a music-video-like sequence of him serenading Anne. When Jean-Louis is on a joyride in his Mustang convertible as waves crash into his car on a Deauville beach, or driving his Ford GT40 roadster at Le Mans, Lelouch certainly makes speed seem both addictive and alluring. One might imagine that the leading man’s uncle, Maurice Trintignant, a French race-car driver who was on the 1965 Ford team at Le Mans, brokered a product-placement-style agreement between Lelouch and the automaker that benefited both parties.

Thus far in A Man and a Woman, we know about Anne’s loss and her work. Having agreed to accompany Jean-Louis to Deauville, she tells him that she doesn’t know what he does for a living. He explains that his job is to find the speed that will win the race without loss of life. He might be a thrill-seeker, but he can’t afford to be reckless. “At 141, you leave the road; at 139, you lose the race,” he says.

In the U.S. in 1966, it didn’t seem unusual to see a working woman on-screen. However, in France, it wasn’t until 1965 that the national legislature passed a law allowing married women to work and open a bank account without permission from their husbands. Anne represents this new French woman. Her job is an extension of her character, as Jean-Louis’s is of his. In her recovery from loss, continuity is key, while movement and speed are what enable him to escape his similar trauma, by cheating death himself. The film asks whether love is possible again after the death of a loved one.

In Deauville, Anne and Jean-Louis fetch the children for Sunday lunch. Françoise and Antoine are not noticeably jealous of their respective parent’s new friend. Jean-Louis wraps his arm around Anne’s chair, restraining himself from caressing her. On their way back to Paris, Anne asks about Jean-Louis’s wife. His account of Valérie (Valérie Lagrange) is all the more gutting for his lack of visible emotion: We learn, matter-of-factly, that Jean-Louis went into a coma after a near-fatal crash during the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Believing his death was imminent, Valérie committed suicide. As Anne takes all this in, Jean-Louis’s hand is near the gearshift, clutching hers.

Does she recognize that Jean-Louis, like the late Pierre, is an adrenaline junkie? Does he recognize that he might be attracted to Anne because she, unlike Valérie, is not afraid of risk-takers? As he races in the Monte Carlo Rally, Anne reads Moteurs, a racing periodical, and closely follows the sports news on television. Only a fraction of the racers complete the rally—among them Jean-Louis. Anne sends her congratulations by telegraph: “Bravo. I love you.” Even after he has driven the thousand-kilometer race, Anne’s message inspires him to drive a thousand more to see her. Accompanied by the metronomic rhythms of his windshield wipers and Francis Lai’s instrumental theme music, he makes Paris in record time. But she’s not home. It’s the weekend. She’s in Deauville. Only two hundred kilometers more. And voilà! He finds her on the beach with Françoise and Antoine.

The adults embrace. They return their children to school. They rent a room. They try, and fail, to consummate their love. Memories of Pierre intrude upon Anne’s attempt to be intimate with Jean-Louis. They are out of sync. This time, she does not ride back to Paris with Jean-Louis, who grimly drives her to the train.

Lelouch and screenwriting collaborator Pierre Uytterhoeven had planned that the lovers would not end the film happily, with an unsmiling Anne disembarking from the train alone. That was what Aimée, who had actually boarded a train from Deauville to Paris, expected. Instead, the director invited Trintignant to drive to Gare Saint-Lazare with him, to film the actress’s spontaneous reaction upon seeing Trintignant, when she expected only Lelouch. Would Anne walk by Jean-Louis without acknowledging him?

The ending that Lelouch orchestrated winds up exploding in joy. As Jean-Louis and Anne simultaneously speed to the capital, each recalls an episode from the previous night at the hotel restaurant: noting the waiter’s distress that they have not ordered starters with their steaks, Jean-Louis cheekily calls the waiter back, and asks for a hotel room. Both smile at the memory, indicating that, psychically, they are in sync again. On the platform at Gare Saint-Lazare, Jean-Louis waits for her train. When Anne emerges from the railcar, she is thrilled to see him. As Agnès Varda liked to say, “Chance is my best assistant.” One imagines that Lelouch would concur.

The camera circles Anne and Jean-Louis as they embrace, validating the possibility that they will be able to love again. Rewatching the film as an adult, I realize that the director prepared me for decades of French films that don’t resolve everything in the end.

To everyone’s surprise, including Lelouch’s, A Man and a Woman became a worldwide hit. It shared the 1966 Cannes Palme d’Or with Pietro Germi’s The Birds, the Bees and the Italians. It won Oscars for Best Foreign-Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. The BAFTAs, the British film awards, honored Aimée as Best Actress, as did the Golden Globes (where the film also won in the foreign-language category). And significantly, in addition to the awards and money it reaped, A Man and a Woman—a favorite of Mike Nichols’s and Hal Ashby’s—enabled Lelouch to have a career. Since its release, he has produced and directed dozens of films in multiple genres. If you’re looking for more of his work, start with The Crook (1970), a favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s; the heist film Happy New Year (1973), a favorite of Stanley Kubrick’s; and the romantic biopic Edith and Marcel (1982), about Édith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan. Still, I would have to say that A Man and a Woman is the most profoundly satisfying entry in Lelouch’s filmography. Despite its unassuming title, the movie rewards the viewer with surprising specificity.

To Become the Sky: A Conversation with Jess X. Snow

Robin D. G. Kelley — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 10:24:00 +0000

I came to know Jess X. Snow first as a muralist and a poet before seeing any of their films. I’m glad this was my entry point because it gave me insight into their vision. First, Snow brings to cinema a painterly sensibility, an eye for composition, color, space, and the organic relationship between human and nonhuman characters. Their films are visually stunning but shorn of grandeur and adornment—natural, even in moments suffused with magical realism. And yet Snow manages to make images that are simultaneously intimate and monumental—not unlike their murals. Second, they are poetic. The dialogue in their films is economical yet transcendent, written and delivered in the cadence of breath. Interiority breaks through the mundane, naked and free from the constraints of the English language and the spoken word. There is intimacy without sentimentality.

Four of Snow’s films—Safe Among Stars, Little Sky, I Wanna Become the Sky, and Roots That Reach Toward the Sky—are now playing on the Criterion Channel, and all of them are about queer Asians who, by the filmmaker’s own description, not only refuse their assigned roles as model minorities but “whose very existence challenge binaries, borders, and empire.” These films do not simply unearth queer stories, they also epitomize queer filmmaking at its best. Demanding more than understanding, empathy, and recognition, they invite us to imagine the narrative feature that will come next and experience multiple possibilities of freedom and transformation. In other words, sky is not the limit—it is the opening, an infinite canvas upon which we can create a new world.

I had the privilege of speaking with Snow about their artistic journey, the making and meaning of these films, and their vision of queer diasporic cinema.

I’d like to begin with your story. How did you come to make art, and when did you turn to filmmaking?: My parents migrated from Nanchang, China, to Canada, where I was born. They divorced when I was six, so my mom and I came to the U.S. Growing up, I had a stutter, and barely spoke, so the constant movement and instability led me to want to create a sanctuary for myself through art. Poetry and visual art became a portal to another world where I could process familial trauma and set myself free.

This eventually led me to becoming a muralist in my early twenties. Murals help monumentalize the inner struggles and resilience of a community into an external piece of community art. The rebellious do-it-yourself ethos that drives a lot of my filmmaking can be traced to these community art projects. While those large-scale murals are filled with beauty and wonder, I longed to also express the intimate and the ugly, everything my immigrant family raised me to keep inside myself. I noticed in the pursuit of collective liberation there was a piece of my own liberation that was being suppressed. That’s when I made the jump to film.

Film felt like the most sincere love letter I could leave behind for my younger self. To use the fantastic and the speculative to reimagine my relationship with the ugly, with failure, with sensuality, and, ultimately, with my own parents.

How did you learn how to make movies?: Before I went to film school, I made no-budget experimental documentaries and narrative films. For my MFA in film I attended New York University, where I sharpened my technical and narrative storytelling skills. Being at NYU, where I made three of the films in the collection, also reactivated this model-minoritarian seed planted inside of me by my immigrant parents at a very young age; that subconsciously tied my self-worth to my performance as a “good” student or model citizen. Perhaps I created messy Asian diasporic characters who rejected the role of the model minority to give me the courage to eventually do so myself. However, the film industry I was soon introduced to felt so profit-driven, I sought out people like radical abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore and scholars like yourself who helped me understand filmmaking as just another way to connect the personal with collective struggle. In [your book] Freedom Dreams, you wrote that “[no revolution] can truly proceed without a revolution of the mind. A revolution in thinking—the feeling of being able to see every single plane of life as its lived, and that those planes are both Surreal, the dream-state, and the landscape of the other side of Earth.” This complete transformation of the mind is what I dream to one day immerse audiences in through my films.

How did queerness become centered in your work, and how does it shape your approach to filmmaking?: Queerness is reflected in my art, in my own being, and in the lives of many people who make up my chosen family. But rather than focusing on queer sexuality or “coming out” stories, I explore queerness as a chosen community that refuses to dispose of one another. As a nonhierarchical way of remaining in intimate kinship with the earth.

I also think queer experiences expand our capacity to accept failure. My characters are outsiders who are always “failing”: failing to perform for their partner, the mother, the school system, the state—which leads to their breaking points. I explore these breaking points as portals to immense wisdom. Each portal an opportunity to create a chosen family when the one that birthed you failed, an opportunity to imagine otherwise.

I was struck by the opening scene of Safe Among Stars. Before you see anything, you hear [the protagonist] Jia’s voice at the threshold of what will be a sexual assault, which is how she learns to leave her body. Later, she harnesses that power to bring her lover to a safe, fugitive space.: Yes, that’s totally right. She’s experiencing post-traumatic stress, where trauma stays in the body long after it happened. I wanted to create a metaphor for disassociation through teleportation; Jia, played by Poppy Liu, at the first feeling of discomfort—even with a new trustworthy partner—unwillingly disassociates into a world where she becomes one with flora, inseparable from nature.

After her eventual healing, she ultimately earns the ability to have more agency over her teleportation and bring her partner along with her into this sanctuary. Jia’s trauma never fully leaves her. Safe Among Stars explores an eastern, holistic approach to trauma healing that teaches us to befriend the trauma, move with it, until we can work with its wisdom and power on our own terms.

Safe Among Stars

Let’s talk about Little Sky. How did you come to that story?: I was trying to process difficult memories of my upbringing, feelings of not being accepted for my authentic self by my family of origin. I wanted to make an ode to my queer chosen family, who fully embraced me in my adult life. I wanted to witness a protagonist learn how to hold their parents’ flaws in their full humanity so I could one day finally forgive my own parents. The protagonist, Sky, was also inspired by the first-time actor Wo Chan, a friend who is a poet and drag performer who has a presence worthy of the big screen. In the film, Sky confronts their father’s toxic masculinity and witnesses how much that masculinity is a cage that not only breaks Sky’s heart but also their father’s capacity to love.

In Little Sky, you deftly use music to express the characters’ deepest emotions. I was especially moved when Sky sings, “My father put a border in my blood; as long as it stands, I’ll never be free.”: I think the fusion of music and visuals form the lifeblood of a film. Working seamlessly with the visceral 16 mm and digital cinematography by Zamarin Wahdat, and vibrant costume design by Sueann Leung, composer and musical director Lia Ouyang Rusli created a vibrant and textured original score and produced the songs. Kyoko Takenaka, who plays Sky’s friend and eventual bandmate, Miyo, wrote and performs in the culminating song: “If no one sees our light, we will see each other’s.”

We also included an old Chinese folk song that my parents used to sing to me when they were still together. In the climax, Sky sings it to their father to force him to remember them. Little Sky speaks to how music has the power to bring my parents’ generation of Chinese families together, even when they can’t see eye to eye, whereas my generation uses music to find their chosen family, the way Sky found Miyo through a performance, in an otherwise homophobic world. Little Sky is an ode to the power of music to build community and soothe even the deepest of familial wounds.

Little Sky

I loved the simplicity of I Wanna Become the Sky and loved you in it. And yet I’m curious why you decided to become the principal actor in that film.: I Wanna Become the Sky explores the idea of a dragon within oneself that must be repressed as an apt metaphor for how marginalized people have had to assimilate in order to survive empire. We’re taught to hide our queerness, our neurodivergence, our failures, and our radical ideas because they threaten white supremacy. But it is precisely that force that fuels the imagination necessary to resist this world and build another.

I wanted to put myself into the shoes of an actor to understand what an actor must do to deliver a visceral performance. I’m grateful to have had the support of an experienced scene partner, Joecar Hanna, and a codirector, traci kato-kiriyama, who after each take would ask me to be more present, to feel deeper. It was cathartic to me because I was raised to suppress my own emotions and always be a container to hold those of others. By playing the protagonist, I had to be present. I had to give myself permission to release my own dragon, which took the form of orange particles coming out of my chest animated by Jeremy Leung. This healing experience was one of the moments where I experienced what you call “a revolution of the mind,” where acting under traci’s direction enabled me to return to my body so I can sharpen my imagination and be of better service to the collective.

I Wanna Become the Sky

In Roots That Reach Toward the Sky, the lead character, Kai, played by Shirley Chen, is suffering from overwhelming anxiety while working in a space of healing—her mother’s Chinese apothecary. The healer is in desperate need of healing. Was that deliberate?: To interrogate the stigma around mental health in my community, I wanted to tell a story where even the healers and providers are allowed to break down and learn to receive healing in times of crisis. Of course, during COVID, there was an escalation of anti-Asian violence, especially in Chinatowns and Chinese medicine shops. In Roots [made with the film and literary production house Tierra Narrative], we see how two very different queer Asian American femmes approach healing from such violence—Zia (played by CHamoru actor alyxåndra ciale) through the external act of mural-making and organizing a group of Black and brown people to provide mutual aid, and Kai by retreating into their own world of diasporic herbs. The healing power of Kai’s mother’s Chinese medicine and her partner’s invitation into the power of community art create a kind of symbiosis. The lush 16 mm film cinematography by Sheldon Chau and an uplifting original score by treya lam immerse viewers into a story about how healing can reunite a community in crisis.

My aunt and grandma are acupuncturists and Chinese medicine doctors. However, it was only later in life that I discovered acupuncture as an integral part of my own healing journey. Roots is an ode to this intergenerational healing practice.

Roots That Reach Toward the Sky

In all of your films, the plants, the sky, the landscape, food, fabric on a clothesline, jars of herbs are all minor characters. They’re not just background. And they are shot with such loving attention to texture and detail.: I believe that flora and fauna and even minerals actually feel. In my films, I wanted to grant them the same reverence as humans. This we must do in both our storytelling and practice of living if we’re serious about climate justice. The plant and spirit worlds are brought to life in my films through integrating the sound design into the beginning of the creative process. In Roots That Reach Toward the Sky [sound designed and mixed by Yiming Zhang and Haina Zhou], we used sound to immerse viewers in Jia’s experience of noise sensitivity after her window is broken and vandalized. During a panic attack she seeks support from nature by holding on to a resilient plant growing from a crack in the concrete. In Safe Among Stars, I worked with the sound designer Paul Wyderka to create a unique architecture in Jia’s plant-filled sanctuary she teleports to—recalling a church in a dark corner of the mind. We did this through multiple layers of ambient nature sounds, convolution reverb, and delay.

Cinema has the power to show us different ways of experiencing time beyond what is linear: geologic time, spirit time, dream time, and plant time. Experiencing these different tiers of time draws a bridge between the human and nonhuman worlds, which expands our ability to imagine the undoing of Western hierarchy.

What is next for you?: My shorts finding a home on the Criterion Channel closes a decade-long journey. Now I’m moving into narrative features. We plan on shooting my debut fiction feature, When the River Split Open, at the end of this year. It is a surreal road movie that follows a nonbinary Chinese American who reunites with their maternal family in China’s Poyang Lake region, where they discover a family secret that launches them on a spiritual odyssey to find the truth about their estranged father.

I’m also in early development for my second feature: an erotic horror film about a timid Chinese American PhD student who encounters a utopian ghost community from the Chinese Exclusion era that alters the course of her life. You once wrote: “Sometimes the discovery of the self is produced in struggle, collective struggle for change.” I want to put the audience in the shoes of a protagonist who experiences an awakening that is as personal as it is political when she’s thrust into both the horrors and wonders of her untold history.

The Rolling Stones on the Brink of Superstardom

Vadim Rizov — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:11:00 +0000

Deep Dives

In 2021, I saw the Rolling Stones in Nashville during their No Filter tour, which began in 2017 but whose North American leg had been postponed once for Mick Jagger to have surgery, then again by the pandemic. Drummer Charlie Watts had died a few weeks before the twice-rescheduled dates, but the Stones subbed in his personally chosen replacement, Steve Jordan, and didn’t miss a beat in finally completing their tour. That night, after a brief in-memoriam video, the band launched into a nearly two-hour set, whose undiluted professionalism and energy was given a particular punch early on by Jagger’s between-songs observation that “we first came to Nashville in 1965.” He stretched out the year with his characteristic drawl, casually underlining the group’s stunning longevity.

Formed in 1962, the Stones toured relentlessly from the get-go while maintaining a recording schedule that required them to pad out albums with covers; “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” became their first international number-one single in July, and their first album of all-original compositions, Aftermath, would come the following year. At the start of their apex, the Stones’ touring duties included a quick run through Ireland for two days, which was documented by Peter Whitehead in Charlie Is My Darling, a sort of proof-of-concept for the band’s on-screen viability. The impetus for the film came from businessman Allen Klein, who viewed movies less as an end in themselves than as potential vehicles for profitable soundtrack releases. As was so often the case in the Stones’ early career, the shadow of the Beatles hung heavy due to their precedent-setting successes with A Hard Day’s Night and Help!

Described upon its premiere by no less than Josef von Sternberg as “a very beautiful film” and “very valuable social document,” Charlie isn’t among the best known of the band’s copious cinematic self-portraits. Among the more famous highlights are two decidedly downbeat documents: 1970’s Gimme Shelter, which unavoidably centers around a stabbing death at the band’s Altamont concert, and 1972’s Cocksucker Blues, many of whose scenes of on-the-road depravity were (the Stones claimed) staged by the band itself. Subsequently, the group would pivot to more purely music-focused concert films, professional demonstrations of live firepower with minimal offstage material. But Charlie Is My Darling stands out from both of these strands of their filmography: it’s very pleasant, a cheerful, upbeat, and funny artifact that shows the band performing in Dublin and writing songs together when not running in pack formation from their adoring fans. Everyone still likes one another, and the group are arguably more engaging offstage than on—not how most fans typically imagine the Stones.

Before the making of Charlie Is My Darling was underway, other film projects were initially considered, including two proposed literary adaptations that would star Jagger, one of A Clockwork Orange and another of Dave Wallis’s novel Only Lovers Left Alive, about a dystopian world populated solely by violent teens (per the cover: “SMASHING, LOOTING, KILLING, LOVING—THE TEENAGERS TAKE OVER THE WORLD!”). Michael Winner and Nicholas Ray were among the directors considered for the latter, but nothing came of either project. Enter Whitehead, recruited by Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham on the reputational strength of his documentary Wholly Communion, which captured an all-day Beat poetry concert/happening at the Royal Albert Hall. A working-class art-school graduate, Whitehead was at the beginning of an eclectic career that would include collaborating with Niki Saint de Phalle on her 1973 Daddy before moving away from filmmaking altogether to pursue falconry. Whitehead didn’t know the Stones at all, nor had he planned to become a nonfiction filmmaker. He later reflected: “Bergman, Godard, Fellini, Antonioni. That was the cinema, completely. There was nothing else [ . . .] that’s what I was brought up on. God knows why I ended up making documentary films.” Charlie Is My Darling draws less from those influences than from Whitehead’s background as a newsreel photographer. He was able to shoot flexibly, subbing in prerecorded music whenever the live tracks were unusable, for a film that the band—or at least its management—didn’t find flattering.

Given what a contentious object Charlie was from its inception, it’s remarkable that Whitehead would continue to actively collaborate with the group over the next two years, working on multiple music videos while pitching larger projects that never came to fruition. Whitehead and Oldham repeatedly argued about the former’s edits, and the filmmaker claimed that the manager broke into his flat with an accomplice, saying that if Whitehead didn’t hand over Charlie they’d “beat the fuck out” of him. It took many years for the film, which was reedited in 2012, to make its way back into public circulation; inevitably, the qualities that worried the band and its team the most—its uncommercial nature, particularly the jagged editing and the relatively unpolished interviews—are the ones that have helped the film age best.

The tour shown here wasn’t the Stones’ first time in Ireland; in January of that year, the band was on a three-day tour when it stopped in a small army-surplus shop. As bassist Bill Wyman would recall, “Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Andrew went inside to look around. The proprietor refused to serve them, and talked about ‘having not forgotten Oliver Cromwell.’ They exchanged insults, and walked out, but Andrew peed against the shop front.” Later that year, the Stones would make the news for their own urination-on-a-gas-station incident—one of their early, relatively innocuous brushes with tabloid fame, this time leading to a court date—but none of that contextual agita is even implicitly perceptible in the good-natured film.

Whitehead joins the band a few months after the latter incident as they fly from London to Dublin, then travel by train to follow-up gigs in Belfast, conducting sit-down interviews with all members along the way. Jagger holds forth on fame and celebrity while chain-smoking; Brian Jones earnestly expresses his desire to transition to film directing; Wyman claims that being in a band doesn’t mean he’s an actual musician of the caliber he aspires to be; and Watts similarly describes his inferiority complex. Keith Richards is less present in interviews than in late-night jam sessions where he and Mick trade lyrics back and forth, strumming along as they carve out casual milestones and slipping into their most natural shared language. “What I liked most about this film,” Whitehead reflected in 1974, “was the fact that when the Stones were talking they were really quite inarticulate. [ . . .] There was a kind of groping. There was an extraordinary inability to describe what they were doing. In fact, Brian Jones was the only one who was really articulate.” These verbal infelicities come across as the endearingly dazed reaction of young men just barely able to wrap their heads around what’s happening to them; seeing them play is a reminder of why all this is happening in the first place.

Their private nocturnal hangouts were in part a matter of necessity: the film shows the Beatlesesque hysteria that shadows the band as they get from one location to another, and the shows were no less intense. Wyman has described July and August of 1964 as “probably the two most horrendous months of our career. Every gig we did was stopped by the police with crowds on the stage.” The songs in this film are delivered less as performances than as experiments—borne with phlegmatic stoicism by the musicians—in seeing how far the band can get before being derailed by fans rushing the stage. During a Dublin rendition of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” the Daily Mirror reported, “Bill was knocked to the floor, an arm badly sprained, as screaming girls and boys stormed the stage. Mick was lifted off his feet and pushed through a door at the side of the stage. His jacket was torn to shreds. Andrew Oldham cracked his head as he fought to clear the teenagers off the stage. Keith, Charlie and Brian ran out of the stage door into a waiting car.” While that particularly chaotic gig isn’t depicted here—a calmer take of the months-old hit being performed is used instead—Michelangelo Antonioni was reportedly influenced by a cut of the film he watched in Whitehead’s apartment before shooting a scene for Blow-Up in which Jeff Beck destroys a guitar, starting a riot.

The band’s most pleasurable musical interactions come not at the shows but at the end as, abandoning songwriting purposefulness altogether, Mick gets drunk and impersonates, among others, Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, while Keith plays the piano. It’s a moment of pure homage and shared pleasure, the kind of collective love that bonds a band, reminiscent of the aimless but necessary jams and singalongs the Beatles use to kill time between engineers setting up the microphones in Get Back. In its own way, Charlie is as methodical a portrait of musicians at work as the much more targeted and intensive sessions documented three years later in Sympathy for the Devil by one of Whitehead’s guiding lights, Jean-Luc Godard, whose scripts he’d translated and published. In Godard’s record (intercut with more characteristic footage of Black Panther and Marxist messaging), the band are relentlessly locked-in songwriters, utterly unconcerned with their on-screen charisma levels as they focus on recording what ended up being one of their most enduring staples. In Charlie, they are not yet fully formed stars, but they are already complete musicians by avocation, most at ease among themselves and working on what they love.

The Marriage Plot

Penny Lane — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 05:14:00 +0000

In contemporary China, a wife hires a professional “mistress dispeller” to end her husband’s affair. The dispeller’s technique is to befriend both the unwitting husband and mistress under false pretenses, so she can manipulate them into breaking up. Will the mistress be dispelled? Will the deception be revealed?

This is the plot of Elizabeth Lo’s documentary Mistress Dispeller (2024), and it is absolutely thrilling. And I use the word plot intentionally (as opposed to story), to call attention to the exquisite craft that has gone into its construction.

Documentary people don’t tend to talk much about plot, maybe because it sounds manipulative, like anything needing as much heavy work as a plot is suspicious. The experience of watching Mistress Dispeller is, indeed, tied up in the feeling that what you are seeing is so well-constructed that perhaps it is not . . . real? When I type “Mistress Dispeller” into Google, the top question it helpfully suggests I might be wondering is “Is Mistress Dispeller a real documentary?” And many reviews have referred to this as the ultimate "How’d they shoot that?" documentary. Part of what makes the film so riveting, at least to me, is this disorientating sense of ethical transgression.

This is of course because there is a lot of deception in the proceedings. Neither the husband nor the mistress is aware of the true motivations of the mistress dispeller, or of the filmmaking team. Lo could not be totally upfront about what they were filming—they kept it true, but vague, saying it was a documentary about modern love and dating in China. That asymmetry generates tension and dramatic irony that feels closer to fiction film than to conventional documentary. By embedding us within a process whose outcome is uncertain, Lo converts lived experience into high-stakes drama.

Yet Lo refuses to treat this combustible material as some kind of reality-TV spectacle. “I didn’t want to make a tabloid film,” she said. Instead, she builds the film through composed, patient observation. The camera is steady, shots are carefully framed, and scenes are allowed to breathe. Her elegant, restrained formal choices frame all of these plot machinations with a nonjudgmental but highly editorial eye.

A good plot results more than anything in the feverish need to keep watching. And even a good documentary plot need not be formally mind-blowing to keep us engaged. It’s really this last aspect—its engagement in form—that makes Mistress Dispeller so extraordinary.

Lo favors composed, locked-off frames that let social relations register spatially. For example, the first time we see husband and wife, they are seated at the same table but held apart by negative space—they’re as far apart as the lens will allow them to be. It feels less like a messy documentary capture, and more like a perfectly blocked drama—which is precisely why viewers start to wonder if it can possibly be real.

Each character in the love triangle is given the respect of time and space to be fully human, but most striking to me is how the mistress, arguably the most vulnerable figure in the arrangement, is treated with unusual care. In a premise that could easily reduce her to antagonist or obstacle—the plot is literally “dispel the mistress”—she is instead granted the same dignity as everyone else. I would argue this is the most radical part of the film.

Outside the triangle, but manipulating all involved in it, is Teacher Wang, the dispeller. She mediates the situation while allowing all involved to save face. She is part strategist, part therapist, part actor who reveals some specific aspects of Chinese culture—a tradition of favoring the use of mediators over direct confrontation—while also reminding us that, as Lo has said, these kind of romantic troubles are “the most relatable thing in the world.”

Of course, ultimately, the plot (there’s that word again) had to be revealed to all to secure final consent to use the footage. “We started filming in 2021, and we filmed with multiple cases and various clients over three years,” Lo said. “The couple that you see in the film is the couple that we got the richest and deepest access with and who chose to remain in the film by the end of the process.”

This layered, gradual negotiation for access and consent mirrors the emotional choreography Lo captures with her patient, careful camerawork. There are similar stages of revelation and renegotiation in both the on-camera and off-camera work she is doing.

Mistress Dispeller is even more remarkable when one considers it is only Lo’s second feature documentary. Her first feature, Stray (2020), follows one street dog in Istanbul, and its formal gamble was to decenter the human viewpoint and align her camera with the dog. Both films are masterclasses in perspective.

But they are equally masterclasses in the kind of faith and devotion that great art requires. For Mistress Dispeller, Lo filmed for years inside an ethically volatile situation without any guarantee that anyone would ultimately sign releases. That is faith. In both films, Lo goes to extraordinary lengths to represent, honor, and dignify the points of view of her subjects. That is devotion. Lo’s commitment to her own ethical and artistic process allowed her to create a documentary that feels at once ethical and observational and, improbably, exhilarating.

Killers of the Flower Moon: A Prayer from the Abyss

Adam Piron — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 06:10:00 +0000

One summer, when I must have been around seven years old, my grandmother told me a story about a wealthy Native American family. It was during the annual road trip that we would make, from Arizona through western Oklahoma’s sea of grass, to a reunion of the side of my family that hails from the Kiowa Tribe. The family she described were so incredibly rich, they lived in a mansion, owned luxury cars, and even employed white servants. The image was utterly bewildering, like something out of an alternate reality. I asked if they were part of our tribe, but she said they were not; they were Osage, from the other side of the state. I never asked how she knew about them or what became of them, and this lingering story from my childhood only gained clarity years later, when I learned of the Osage people’s history, and again in 2017, when it was announced that Martin Scorsese would be adapting David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

In his meticulously researched book, Grann details the calculated genocide of Osage tribal members in eastern Oklahoma during the 1920s. Driven by the Osage Nation’s oil wealth, white settlers orchestrated what was later called a “Reign of Terror”—a slew of murders by way of poisoning, bombing, and shooting—to seize oil headrights. Grann frames the narrative around the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation’s inquiry, shifting focus from the perpetrators’ identities to the systemic conspiracy, the pervasive guilt, and the frustrating pursuit of justice. The murders are highlighted as an institutional failure, yet the Osage narrative was distinct among Native American tribes because the tormentors did face prosecution, even if some ultimately evaded justice.

Scorsese’s decision to adapt this monumental book—and, critically, his willingness to confront one of America’s foundational sins, the genocide of its Indigenous people—presented an opportunity for a vital cultural moment and marked a novel direction in a career then spanning forty-two features. Given his stature, the project was uniquely positioned to achieve a scale and an audience that few, if any, other filmmakers at that time could have commanded. As a longtime admirer of the iconic director’s work, I was undeniably intrigued by the prospect; yet, as a Native person navigating an America demanding to be made great again, I felt some personal apprehension stirred up by the endeavor.

My initial concern about the film, announced during Donald Trump’s politically charged first term as president, stemmed from the turbulence in Indian Country that had erupted since his election in 2016. This era kicked off with the forced ending by the National Guard of the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the weaponization of “Pocahontas” as a slur, the banning of books on Indigenous history, the increased scrutiny of racist sports-team names, and the alarming rates of violence against Native American women, often by non-Indigenous perpetrators, finally receiving national attention. I was not concerned about Scorsese’s aims, nor about his collaborations with Indigenous artists like Robbie Robertson or the Osage themselves, but rather about how non-Native audiences would react to this depiction of historical violence. Would it inspire a meaningful reevaluation of the United States’ treatment of Native peoples, or would provocateurs distort and weaponize it? Those fears were ultimately put to rest when I eventually experienced Scorsese’s dark epic—most prominently by its astonishing coda and final shot.

Undoubtedly, as a prolific student of cinema history, Scorsese went into this production aware of the medium’s troubled past with regard to Indigenous communities—defined by extractive practices, the reinforcement of damaging stereotypes, and the eclipsing of real, historical suffering for the sake of entertainment. Careful to avoid these pitfalls, he approached this adaptation through direct engagement and collaboration with the Osage themselves, an interaction that resulted in a fundamental shift in the story’s vantage point. Instead of Grann’s FBI-procedural narrative, Killers of the Flower Moon would be reoriented to focus primarily on the perspective of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and, secondarily, on that of his Osage wife, Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone). This reshaping exposes Ernest’s role in the genocide orchestrated by his uncle, local Southern-gentleman autocrat William King Hale (Robert De Niro), and allows the audience to observe the deterioration of Ernest’s marriage to Mollie as he slowly poisons her while eliminating members of her family and tribe. And it bolsters Scorsese’s meticulous examination of societal guilt, allowing him to scrutinize more closely every facet of how such heinous acts were able to unfold so brazenly.

While analyses often connect the spiritual themes in Scorsese’s films to his Catholic faith and his early aspiration to the priesthood, they frequently overlook that his filmmaking itself can function as an act of worship or intercessory prayer. Scorsese’s earlier films often present parables of sinners: prodigal-son types whose rises and falls are marked by either finding a semblance of salvation or being consumed by their trespasses. Examples include Jake La Motta hitting rock bottom in Raging Bull (1980), Henry Hill’s nosedive in Goodfellas (1990), and Sam “Ace” Rothstein stacking the odds against himself in Casino (1995). However, a major shift has occurred as of late in his body of work. From Silence (2016) and The Irishman (2019) to Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Scorsese’s narrative focus has noticeably flipped from explorations of the sinner’s journey to jeremiads on the fundamental nature of sin itself, a change perhaps signaled by his increasingly winding run times (161, 209, and 206 minutes, respectively). From this perspective, one could read Silence as examining the self-destruction inflicted by sin, The Irishman as grieving the damage it does to those we love, and Killers of the Flower Moon as observing the gulf it creates between us. As if on his own road to Damascus, Scorsese has been turning increasingly inward, knowingly pondering questions that may not have answers on this side of heaven.

Scorsese’s depiction of the crimes against the Osage becomes a search for decency within an increasingly morally bankrupt world. He struggles to fully grasp the perpetrators’ boundless evil, suggesting a darkness too profound for even his lens. Potentially as a balm, Scorsese frequently turns to the Osage, consistently finding moments of light in their spiritual and communal life. Through the character of Mollie, the Osage are portrayed as living for values beyond individual self-interest, ones rooted in traditions, spiritual practices, and strong social bonds. Mollie, the film’s only explicitly Christian (specifically Catholic) character, serves as a moral anchor, bridging Osage and Christian spiritual worlds through her church attendance and mourning rites.

Mollie’s internal duality also mirrors the historical reality of Osage syncretism, which flourished during the tribe’s oil boom. Following their forced removal to Oklahoma, the Osage resisted total cultural assimilation by forging a distinct, hybrid spiritual identity, despite the efforts of missionaries to assimilate them. This was achieved by integrating Christian elements—such as equating the Christian God with the Osage Great Spirit (Wakonda)—while steadfastly maintaining their core beliefs and ceremonial life. Mollie’s practice of engaging with both Indigenous rites and Catholic services is a direct example of this blending. These are not only acts of faith but acts of survival and resistance.

Scorsese portrays Mollie as a figure of moral purity—an Indigenous Madonna enduring the suffering and violence inflicted upon her people. She embodies a natural and spiritual path forward, potentially even representing a hopeful future for the very concept of America’s soul. Her and her people’s blended spirituality—from the pipe burial to her mother, Lizzie Q, meeting with the ancestors after her death—presents the only spiritual certainty outside of the evil inflicted upon them. As the film’s moral compass, Mollie establishes a stark contrast to the more sinister characters, one most evident in her final exchange with Ernest. Following her recovery from being poisoned by him, she confronts her husband in the courthouse after he testifies against Hale’s involvement in the murders. Mollie demands that he confess his deeds, and yet, in a final, craven denial, he refuses: a potent metaphor for the original people of this land demanding that those who wronged them finally acknowledge the undeniable. Ernest’s fate—and, for Scorsese, the fate of all those who fail to admit their complicity in the United States’ sins—is sealed in damnation. The scene fades hauntingly to black.

We’re left to linger in the darkness and to sit with the weight of the irrefutable. It’s a logically bleak conclusion to witnessing over three hours of human depravity at its most brazen. Then, in an initially bewildering transition, Scorsese turns the film in on itself. The abyss is pierced by lights as Killers of the Flower Moon cuts to a packed house seated for a live broadcast of the Lucky Strike–sponsored radio show True Crime Stories. The year is somewhere in the late thirties, nearly a decade from where the film left Mollie and Ernest, and an all-white ensemble dramatically reenacts an abridged version of the preceding narrative of the “Osage Indian murders,” augmented by performed sound effects and a bandleader. The segment concludes with the players reading the fates of those involved in the murders and their eventual evasion of justice, before the show’s producer (played by Scorsese himself) steps up to the microphone to read Mollie’s 1937 obituary. He speaks somberly and observes that it conspicuously omits any mention of the killings.

This moment represents Scorsese’s ultimate scrutiny of his own endeavor to reconstruct this history through a form of popular entertainment. He turns his lens on himself, questioning his proximity to these ills and—as suggested by the absence of any Indigenous presence onstage—even the limits of his own perspective as a non-Indigenous artist. It’s also an acknowledgment of the boundaries and limitations of the medium, definitively situating both author and audience within an extension of a bleak historical chapter and prompting reflection on their shared culpability. In response to Ernest’s refusal to admit transgressions, the director acknowledges his own complicity by entering his film quite literally, seeking a path forward through simple admission. He offers an actionable route for all tied to the country’s foundational sin, presenting a choice and leading by example. Killers of the Flower Moon thus transcends the historical epic, reshaping it into a Möbius strip that blurs audience, film, and director.

This coda mirrors the film’s reinterpretation of Grann’s book after Scorsese’s collaboration with the Osage. The director’s appearance breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging an audience familiar with the source material and using this alienating moment to foster cerebral engagement. It’s a proposal to reconsider the efficacies and inefficacies of reenactments, how they can be consumed passively or used to decontextualize and transform the originals, delving deeper and becoming something novel. Scorsese recognizes that effective translation can reveal the unfathomable, mysterious, and spiritual essence of the original, reinterpreting it in a new language, striving for transformation beyond mere reproduction. It is his acknowledgment of creation itself, in this case as a form of penance or creative worship, echoing the promise from heaven’s throne in the book of Revelation: “Behold, I make all things new.” For Catholics, this signifies a new beginning and renewal through the divine, applying to spiritual transformation, new life in the sacraments, and ultimate renewal—a promise of hope and a call to a new way of living.

In a masterly transition, Scorsese transports his film to the present day, presenting an overhead, God’s-eye view of an Osage drum group. The camera then floats up, revealing tribal members engaged in a traditional counterclockwise dance, a powerful portrayal of a community not only enduring but flourishing, imbued with joy, pride, and resilience. The screen subsequently fades to black, displaying the film’s title in Osage script before converting it to English.

If Killers of the Flower Moon’s portrayal of the Osage Indian murders is Scorsese’s sermon and the True Crime Stories scene his altar call, then the singular God’s-eye view of the Osage can be interpreted as the Almighty’s final judgment, separating the unrighteous from the righteous. Scorsese’s decision to conclude the film in this way also effectively grants the Osage people the definitive final word. After taking center stage in True Crime Stories, Scorsese now steps aside. He doesn’t presume to speak for the Osage; instead, he extends an invitation to the audience to learn from them, just as he did. Much like the man cured by Jesus in the Gospel According to John, Scorsese appears to declare: “I once was blind, but now I see.”

Killers of the Flower Moon: A Formal Feeling

Vinson Cunningham — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 05:40:00 +0000

Toward the beginning of Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), Martin Scorsese’s guileful masterwork of unguileful plunder, a few young members of the Osage Nation are shown in a moment of reverie. They’re jumping and yelling, all elation and sublime relief, their skin covered in rich black oil. The fruit of the earth has brought their people great material wealth, and that’s enough reason to have fun, get hedonistic, throw a party. Scorsese casts the scene in slow motion—that time signature of self-indulgent pleasure—and scores it with pulsating drums. The oil boom is a blessing. Never mind the foreboding that is humming underneath.

Scorsese is, among other things, the great choreographer of glittering moments that come before a great fall. Think of all those grotesque scenes of money-crazed debauchery on the trading floor in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). One woman agrees to let her head of long blond hair be shaved for ten thousand bucks. In Goodfellas (1990), there’s a long, sumptuous take of Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, a gangster on the upswing, guiding his new girlfriend through the back rooms of the Copacabana. Down a flight of stairs and through narrow, dark passageways, into the bustling kitchen, and, finally, out onto the low-lit, dapper floor, where a table is promptly set up for them. Remember the bright color of the tables in Casino (1995), seen from so high above. This is what it looks like to arrive.

All of this is going to go bad, and so it does with Killers. But the Osage people are no gangsters, and Killers traces a very different arc. It tells the story of a florid true crime: how, in the 1920s, the oil wealth of the Osage was stolen by way of a dastardly scheme to murder its rightful inheritors, one by one, through means both clandestine and surreally frank, making all the spoils of that black gold end up in white hands. David Grann’s 2017 book about the murders and the FBI operation that led to their exposure served as source material for Scorsese’s almost three-and-a-half-hour epic: a fitting canvas for a sprawling shame.

And so, in Killers, a darker mood sets in soon. Throughout the story, the Osage show signs of their new wealth: splendid suits and dresses, fancy Pierce-Arrow motorcars, tasteful jewelry. Early on, there is sometimes a spirited dance, where prospective lovers drink and flirt. But slowly, the prior joy begins to shift to watchful restraint, a growing understanding that seemingly all of their white neighbors have trained hungry eyes on their bounty, dead set on getting a piece by way of banking or funeral services or intermarriage or petty theft or outright murder. A foreknowledge of pain kicks up what Emily Dickinson calls a “formal feeling.”

Lily Gladstone, playing Mollie Kyle, is the paragon of this sobriety. When she meets Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, a rascally cabdriver who is the nephew of the most powerful white man in town, she regards him with a calm irony. He starts to flirt with her, and, immediately, with instincts honed by experience, she knows he’s a “coyote” attracted by cash. She doesn’t shout or get worked up or make a big show of falling in love. And yet, as Killers drags her through a doubled ordeal—the relentless string of deaths of her sisters and her mother, and a steep decline in health, both helped along by Ernest—her muted demeanor becomes a kind of sorrow song. Gladstone plays a morbid music almost solely by the use of her eyes. She looks at Ernest, begging him for some shred of reassurance, even as he leads her closer to the grave. Her glances contain knowing (she and her people are likely doomed, largely because of men like her husband) but also hope. Maybe not this time.

In one passage, perhaps the most affecting of the film, Ernest walks into their house, about to deliver yet another item of bad news. The camera, describing his guilty perspective, peeks into room after room, hesitantly gliding through the home. When he finally opens the door to the basement, where Mollie and the rest of her family have been hiding in fear, all he has to do is give her a look. She starts to moan and wail in her husky voice.

Gladstone’s performance as Mollie is the sad, true heart of this film, a force that connects the various strands of thematic substance not only in Killers but across many of Scorsese’s investigations. Killers is actually, in some ways, yet another Scorsese gangster flick, filled with unscrupulous, secretly organized types with no morality other than money, and a thin, nihilistic idea of what it means to enjoy a good life. But it is also, in the Jesuit sense, an examination of conscience, a white filmmaker’s prayerful, bracing questioning of what it means to live on this land. Scorsese, a cradle Catholic famously interested in vice, has long wrestled with the highest themes of his religion: sin and forgiveness, violence and grace. In this way, Mollie’s interior suffering—call it a Passion—can sometimes remind us of the travails of the Portuguese missionaries to Japan depicted in Silence (2016). Or of the baffled wanderings of Jesus, played by an ecstatic Willem Dafoe, in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). In Killers, and especially in the person of Mollie Kyle, Scorsese’s feuding interests in adrenal energy and contemplative reflection are finally, furiously twinned.

“I do love that money, sir,” Ernest says to his uncle William Hale by way of honestly assessing his own character. Hale, played by Robert De Niro, takes that information in stride—who doesn’t?—and wants to know even more. What kinds of women does his nephew like? As in, racially? “I like red. I like white. I like blue,” Ernest says, maybe accidentally painting the mental image of a sexualized United States flag. This dark collision between DiCaprio and De Niro, the chief prophet-protagonists of Scorsese’s oeuvre down the years, is so funny because of its agile handling of American types. De Niro is the wised-up operator, the calloused veteran, the kind of guy who shakes your lapels and gives you a lesson on the harder sides of life—how, indeed, to harden your own heart. Saul Bellow called this kind of person a “reality instructor.”

Hale struts around town offering his help and companionship to the Osage, pretending to be their foremost friend, speaking and praying quite fluently in their language. And yet he is also nakedly the author of their destruction. He suggests marriages that soon end in brutal sickness, provides advice to the tribal council that always comes to nothing and often ends in blood. Part of the horror-show quality of Killers is this portrait of the corrosive open secret. Everybody knows, nobody knows. The headrights of the Osage—their rightful possession of the oil—keep sliding downward toward the whites. In a montage of notionally “unexplained,” stubbornly uninvestigated deaths, we see a young Osage woman pushing a baby in a pram. Out of nowhere, a white man materializes: he placidly shoots her in the head. We’re informed that the death has been classified as a suicide. Whatever she once owned will now roll downhill to somebody else. Guess who?

The stoic certainty of this theft is always apparent in De Niro’s eyes. It’s also the guiding aesthetic behind Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, which takes broad daylight and human faces and turns them into a nightmarish instruction in the reality of the west at the turn of the twentieth century. In one sequence—yet another station of the cross—Mollie slowly approaches a ravaged corpse. She knows it’s her sister’s, but she must be holding on to hope that there’s been some mistake. We see a sea of faces, a crowd gathered to view the evidence of a lynching. We get the news through their expressions, even more than through the awful image to come. Prieto has worked as DP on The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman (2019), and now Killers. You might think of these films as making up an unquiet quartet on the theme of redemption—how abundantly available it is, how rarely grasped. Lately, Scorsese has doubled down on his natural moralism, aiming his art directly at the places and moments where human beings make decisions, take chances, head out in the direction of corruption or salvation. His and Prieto’s elegant compositions make X-rays of these junctures, and of the sure, inescapable ends toward which they lead.

This determinism can also be found in the music direction of Robbie Robertson, who somehow manages to best his always astute previous work with Scorsese. Killers’ scoring scorches the viewer. There is always a driving drum and a sharp, unlovely melody—guitar, horn, harsh singing—lurking somewhere in this film. Many of the most affecting musical moments meld Native rhythms and rock-and-roll sound, implying and enacting the great churn of American cultural synthesis even while the violence underpinning the encounter is on fervent display. The drums and bass lines, often melting into one another in a droning monotone, keep up a thread of gruesome suspense.

Thelma Schoonmaker’s fleet editing—here more patient and plangent than ever before, her vision maturing in tandem with her longtime collaborator Scorsese’s—sings in harmony with Robertson’s tunes. The message is clear: Fate isn’t just waiting for you. It’s seeking you out and gathering speed. Part of the texture of Schoonmaker’s work in Killers is her handling of the archival images. These photographs—of Osage families posing in high style, of lands that we now know to be spotted with innocent blood—pull at the film’s viewers, threading their consciousnesses into a quilt of complicity. Admire the images, swoon at the performances—still, there’s a constant, artifice-exploding whisper: this is real, this is real, this is real.

Hale is the bard of that sick realism. Speaking to his feckless nephew, he asks, “Ernest, you believe in the Bible? . . . Miracles of old? Expecting a miracle to make all this go away? You know they don’t happen anymore.” Scorsese and Eric Roth’s screenplay is full of brutal gems like this one, offering no escape. Ernest, as portrayed with such lyricism by DiCaprio, is a stupid, lazy man. Nobody tries to deny this. Somebody mentions his “disposition,” and everybody knows that it’s a reference to his dull intelligence. He likes whiskey and cash, wants to “sleep all day” and “make a party when it’s dark.” But in the moral world of Killers—hell, in any moral world worth its salt—this fact is no excuse for the betrayal Ernest carries out. He really loves Mollie and his children, and seems, childishly, to hope that he’ll earn some magical reprieve from the bargain he’s struck with his uncle. In this way, he’s not unlike any “unpolitical” American who, yeah, sure, understands the country’s past villainies but hopes he’ll stumble without too much work into a blameless, enjoyable life. Sin doesn’t work that way. Somebody’s got to say no.

DiCaprio’s two decades of collaboration with Scorsese have been walking in this direction all along. Like their first film together, Gangs of New York (2002), Killers is a work of minutely detailed world-building. The dust caking boots, the city streets, the dangerous landscape pregnant with symbolism: all of it researched and executed within an inch of its life. The verisimilitude feels like a hair shirt—a cleansing bit of painstaking work. DiCaprio’s performance has a touch of mortification in it too. His anguished, avoidant, sneaky, passionless facial expressions are always being undercut and made ironic by the light of truth—however distant—in his eyes. He might not comprehend the whole plan, but he knows his place in it, knows it’s wrong, is too slothful and worldly to wake up and make a cry of repentance.

The great gift of acting is that, in hands like DiCaprio’s, it can play two notes at once. We’re looking at a single man, in command of his own soul, but we are also witnessing a portrait of the national character. Killers was released in 2023, entering a world that had been chastened by the traumas and stirrings of 2020—among them the COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide rebellions following the killing of George Floyd, a conspicuous, Native-led Independence Day protest on the grounds of Mount Rushmore. Suddenly it was impossible to think of Scorsese’s fixation on spiritual reckonings in a totally personalized or privatized way. Sometimes sin happens in the heart; sometimes a whole society comes together to spill the blood of its brothers. The blood keeps crying out from the ground.

The decision to adapt David Grann’s historical tale and render it in such detailed and personal terms is a masterstroke—the latest of many thousands—by Martin Scorsese. Scraped through his tough vision, the story is, at once, a work of individual temptation and structural perdition. Scorsese’s boldest departure from Grann’s narrative, the choice to center the story on Ernest and Mollie instead of on the FBI investigation that uncovered William Hale’s crimes—on the personal instead of the official—follows Emily Dickinson’s injunction to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The relocation points a finger—indicting and beckoning all at once—toward contemporary audiences, who, in their private hearts and out in public, have never seemed so lost, or so unsure of where the crimes of the state end and their own blithe participation begins. To begin to contemplate this very modern problem is to experience even the most everyday aspects of our lives as—Dickinson again—a dazzling, harrowing, often painful “superb surprise.”

The filmmaker doesn’t exempt himself. Killers is, too, an excruciatingly personal exercise in self-questioning: What does it mean to live here? To work and gain “success” here? To make stories—entertainments—using such sordid materials? What does it mean to be attracted to the dark? Hence the second-to-last passage of Killers—perhaps the most abstract, ironic, and unabashedly artistic set piece of Scorsese’s career. The filmmaker, looking just like himself, stands at a microphone, producing a chintzy radio play about the massacre, sanding down the jagged edges to which we all just bore witness. It’s a falsely benign punch in the gut; a sick, miniature reiteration of the whole story; a densely packed symbol of storytelling and blood: the wages of history, and of narrative itself.

The scene recalls an earlier moment in the film, a skin-prickling moment of conscience. Maybe, too, an antidote to so many big lies put forward by so-called civilization: A tribal council has been called in response to the accelerating deaths. What to do? An Osage elder, played by Everett Waller, speaks up. “We need to be like a fire on this earth,” he says, “and get rid of all that stops or gets in front of us.”

That’s Killers: a cleansing fire. It’s not supposed to feel good. The film ends with a vision of the contemporary Osage people, engaged in a dance. They sing and move in concentric circles, unified, and play imprecations on a large drum, as round and troubled as the world. If any confessional impulse lives in you, that faculty starts to vibrate with a strange and unbearable heat, a heat beyond relief. Only then the music ends.

Planet of the Tapes: A Conversation with Alex Ross Perry

Clyde Folley — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:56:00 +0000

The VHS Forever collection now streaming on the Criterion Channel gathers films across a range of genres that illustrate how the titular home-video format changed our relationship with movies. In curating this lineup, I drew upon not only my memories of a lifetime spent wandering the aisles of video stores but also the five years I spent editing Alex Ross Perry’s staggeringly comprehensive essay film Videoheaven (2025), which charts a history of these once-ubiquitous hubs of cinephilia and commerce as depicted in decades of movies and television. On the occasion of the film’s exclusive streaming premiere on the Criterion Channel and the fiftieth anniversary of the invention of VHS, I sat down with Alex to discuss making the film, home video’s seismic impact on the motion-picture industry, and some of our favorite selections in the lineup.

I want to go back to the very beginning and talk about the VCR. It was originally intended not as a way of playing prerecorded movies, but as a “time-shifting device.” What did the purveyors of the VCR mean by that?: I highly recommend Michael Z. Newman’s Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium, a book that analyzes video not as a technology but as a dynamic cultural concept that has shifted in meaning and status in relation to film and television. It’s a book I found really useful in working on this movie. A big part of it was this sudden idea that you could tape the game, or tape the news and watch it when your kid goes to bed, or tape your favorite show and fast-forward through the commercials, which you can imagine would have seemed huge for people. I can’t even imagine how exciting it was for people that had grown up watching TV in the sixties and seventies to suddenly have a godlike control over their entertainment, including the fast-forward button.

Circa 1999, I became a certified [David] Lynch fanatic. Some guy at my dad’s office had all of Twin Peaks (1990–1991); he taped it off the TV when it was on. There was no other way to see it. For like a year [my dad] would bring me home two tapes at a time. And that’s how I saw Twin Peaks, from some guy who started watching it and immediately said to himself, “I should be taping these. I should have whatever this show is.” I don’t know who this guy was. Probably never met him. And this is the gray-market bootleg phenomenon of videotape.

Everything was shifting around how movies were being watched at this time. The thing about video stores and VHS, specifically, is that it strikes me as a democratizing force. This was something that rose from the ground up, not from Hollywood, but from independent sources. For instance, the whole idea of releasing pre-recorded films on videotape didn’t come from the studios. It came from Andre Blay at Magnetic Video Corporation, which was a video-duplication service: He convinced Fox that it would be a good idea to release forty of their most popular titles on home video. They did it, and that was the start of movies on home video as we know it.: It was the start of a movie as a commodity. Prior to that, for fifty-plus years, the theatrical experience was ephemeral. You would experience [a movie], and then it would go away. You would have your memories of it, and then maybe you’d see it again someday in some other form. Suddenly you could say, “Oh, I love that movie, I have it at home, I watch it all the time,” or “I’ll loan it to you.” And suddenly the consumers became the archivists. You could sit in your home and have a shelf of your favorite movies. Clearly in retrospect, that is the moment when the consumer’s relationship with what a movie is changed forever. They went from being these magical objects that flew by you like a comet that you were lucky to get to see, to something that was just around all the time.

Top of page: Loser (as featured in Videoheaven); above: Videodrome

Looking at Videodrome (1983) and Body Double (1984)—two of the earliest films featured in this series and in Videoheaven—they lay out this idea of tapes as illicit objects. The tapes in those films introduce danger and evil and chaos into people’s lives.: I imagine there was something very mysterious about loving movies your entire life, and then suddenly [experiencing] the illicit feeling of, “I could have this at home now.” That must have been extremely destabilizing to the mind of the film lover. You see it in those movies, and in some of these other ones that you’ve selected: 52 Pick-Up (1986), Lost Highway (1997), The Ring (2002).

52 Pick-Up and Lost Highway also treat the tape as pornography-adjacent. They both feature characters who are makers of pornography. Obviously Body Double is the height of this. But I think there’s something to the fact that pornography enters the home via video. The adult-film industry sided with VHS over Betamax in the format war. In these films, VHS is next to pornography and they just keep being presented together.: Imagine how hard it would have been to get your hands on pornography to own. Then all of a sudden you can just get sex on videotape and watch it in your home. After years of thinking of that as some public exercise in exhibitionism and shame, now you can just buy videos. This is kind of the thesis of Videoheaven: [video is about] taking what has only ever been public and making it private. And what better canary in a coal mine for that than pornography?

Why do you still choose to watch certain films on tape when you could watch them in other formats that are readily available?: I just prefer it. Anything that would have been on a video-store shelf as of January 1st, 1999, is a movie I’m happy to watch on tape. This is like asking “Why would you like to watch a movie on a 35 mm print?” Because it’s a living, tangible experience that connects you with every other time this print has ever been shown, and it’s more fun. To me a tape is the same thing. It has that audio quality that you get in a theater when the print starts before the image starts: the clicks, the pops, the hisses, the flicker. A tape has all of that in a way that, for me, a disc never did. A tape is alive the way a print is alive. It can break, it can be defective; that’s part of the fun. It’s like time travel. It’s [a way of] communing with everything we see in Videoheaven. Watching a tape is the only lasting version that I can still access of getting in the car, going to the store, walking the aisles, picking out a movie, getting a pizza, going home, and watching the movie. All of that experience is gone now except for what the movie looks like when I press play.

Many years ago, you recommended to me Daniel Herbert’s book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, which analyzes how video stores served as a hub of movie culture from the 1980s to the 2000s. This book would become the inspiration for Videoheaven. What were your major takeaways from it?: It says in his intro, by 1999, video stores were decreased by 20% from their peak a decade earlier. I remember reading that and thinking, that can’t be possible. To me, that was the peak, 1999. Here I am learning that the peak was when I was five, when I was first stepping foot into these stores. I think having the rug pulled out from me factually really opened my eyes to, like, “Oh I actually don’t know this story, because to me the peak is [when there were] Blockbusters every five miles.” If that was the peak, the industry couldn’t have been eradicated as quickly as it was. That just made me feel like, “Wow, this is a very complicated American retail narrative.”

Clerks

What is it about the eighties that made that the golden era?: The stores were just totally gnarly. They all looked different. Some of them had a thousand, two thousand, three thousand tapes, they really weren’t that vast. Not a cavernous retail space, but a narrow spot in a strip mall. And for me as a six-year-old, that was magical. To be getting a haircut, walking at the strip mall, and there’s just some tiny little spot with neon lighting and unregulated horror movies in front of you.

What do you think the big difference was when stores started having DVDs? What do you think happened when tape gave up the market share? Which was really a quick thing; it was just three or four years.

To me, that’s the line in the sand of when mom-and-pop stores start really biting the dust. Blockbuster can afford to do the full changeover to DVD. Independently owned stores don’t have as much money to do that.: When you go into a store in 1997, the variety of tapes in front of you could be roughly twenty years old. You could be looking at a tape that is fifteen years old, next to a new release. And it was this very organically built-up archive of different shapes of boxes. Big-box tapes, small-box tapes. Clamshell tapes. Tapes that were beat up, tapes that were in perfect condition. Walking through a video store in 2005, everything there is five years old. Just plastic, all plastic except for the snap cases, but everything there went from being a fifteen or twenty-year organic archive, cobbled together from dozens if not hundreds of different distributors, to being a brand-new, very sanitized aesthetic of movie library. To me that was instantly less fun, less visually appealing, less browsable. The Wild West was over. You couldn’t have Troma tapes next to Warner Brothers clamshells next to red-and-black-and-white Columbia RCA.

I know you’re sort of acclaimed for putting these [Criterion Channel collections] together and [including] two or three complete disreputable titles. What were some of your “this was all worth it because I got this on the Criterion Channel” films?

Weirdly, one of those films is Clerks (1994). It’s not even that disreputable of a movie, but it was huge in the ’90s. And if you’re of a certain age, it was huge to you as a teenager. When I got into my twenties, I guess I started thinking of myself as a more sophisticated, highfalutin guy, and I had no interest anymore in Clerks. Then, in the process of working on Videoheaven and circling back to it I realized, no, this is still great. There’s something that’s genuinely raw and working-class about the film that you never really saw in many other movies in this period.: You know, real ones will remember: historically, what was the cheapest, most affordable, and therefore highly ubiquitous Criterion DVD? Chasing Amy (1997). Everybody had it. To me, Kevin Smith is inextricably linked to the physical-media history of the Criterion Collection because of that. And now the idea that decades later, his inimitable debut film is underrated or underseen is impossible for me to wrap my head around. If you are in your late thirties or forties and you think that Clerks belongs in your adolescence, I think you'd see it now as a visually striking and radically written keystone of nineties independent film.

The Big Hit

I’m also tremendously happy to put The Big Hit (1998) on the Criterion Channel. This was a movie that I saw as soon as it came out on video. I don’t even remember why I was aware of it, but I was super into it as a thirteen-year-old. The Big Hit is the Hollywood debut—and the sole Hollywood film at this point—from Hong Kong director Kirk Wong. In the mid-to-late nineties, much of the top Hong Kong talent was going to work in Hollywood. And what I love about this film is that it has a certain kind of abrasive humor. You might even call it obnoxious, but I think it’s very particular to the strain of Hong Kong action cinema that we love. If you watch those movies, it’s nonstop crass humor. And a lot of that gets shaved off with the other filmmakers who go to Hollywood, but Kirk Wong retained it all.: If your casual cultural prejudice against this film is like, “I’ve always assumed that is a garbage, post–Pulp Fiction (1994), guys-with-guns piece of crap,” if the video box scared you off, we have to inform you that The Big Hit is closer to the operatic, Hong Kong–imported American films [of the era] like Face/Off (1997) and Broken Arrow (1996) and Double Team (1997). This is not “The Boondock Saints (1999) but with Mark Wahlberg.” It’s not “Hard Boiled (1992) but with Mark Wahlberg,” but it’s got more of that in it than anyone would think.

Remote Control (1988), along with The Big Hit, is one film that many people walk out of Videoheaven saying, “What was that movie? I should see that.”

Remote Control

The funny thing about Jeff Lieberman, the director of Remote Control, is that he also used to work for Janus Films back in the early seventies. So there’s decades of Janus and Criterion history running through here. I think Remote Control is a total treat. And in terms of the amount of screen time spent in a video store, it ranks pretty high among all the films in the series.: It’s one of our key texts for sure, and it was a real discovery. I had never seen it. The clip that we leapt out of our seats at is where they’re in the car and they say, “They probably dropped off these brainwashing tapes at every video store in town. Where’s the nearest video store?” And they say it’s a mile down the road. We had been searching for years for any clip to illustrate the idea that in the late eighties, video stores reported that their nearest competition was just a few miles away.

No film lays out the geography of video stores in America in 1988 better than Remote Control. I think it’s also worth pointing readers to Bleeder (1999), which is an early Nicolas Winding Refn film that I had not seen or even heard of before working on Videoheaven. It’s especially notable for having Mads Mikkelsen play a video-store clerk. No matter how many Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) T-shirts you put him in, he will still always look like a male model.: I think he looks pretty great. And that is of course how most clerks see themselves. This is real post-Trainspotting (1996), grimy, funny, gross, losers-in-over-their-heads, drugs-and-sex-and-stealing, extreme boy-movie stuff.

Bleeder

Bleeder is a rare film. As far as I know, this isn’t streaming anywhere else.: If Videoheaven celebrates that kind of esoteric, strange, catch-all video-store culture, you look at the handful of films [in VHS Forever] and it’s like, “What are you in the mood for?” Comedy, horror, thriller, a sweet drama like The Fisher King (1991). We have it all here. We have a foreign section here—Japan, Denmark—you can really go around the world. I think it represents in microcosm the thing that people miss about browsing the sections at a video store.

The Criterion Channel’s April 2026 Lineup

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 06:16:00 +0000

Channel Calendars

This April, step into the high-powered boardrooms where dirty deals and vast conspiracies unfold in our Corporate Thrillers collection. New director retrospectives spotlight the radical documentaries of Emile de Antonio and three classic noirs by Jacques Tourneur, while Tramps, Troublemakers, and Trailblazers surveys an emerging generation of trans auteurs. We’re also raiding our archives for a new ongoing feature: out-of-print Criterion editions with their hard-to-find special features. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including a new installment of Adventures in Moviegoing with Mary Bronstein, the exclusive premiere of Bi Gan’s Resurrection, and short films from Blue Heron director Sophy Romvari.

If you haven’t signed up yet, head to CriterionChannel.com and get a 7-day free trial.

*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

Resurrection

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Featuring a new introduction by director Bi Gan, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers Series

With his ravishing third feature, visionary director Bi Gan takes his deepest plunge yet into the realm of pure dreamscape. In a world where humans have forsaken dreams in exchange for immortality, a dreaming monster (Jackson Yee) embarks on a shape-shifting odyssey through illusion, beauty, and terror that takes him across a century of cinema and to the end of time. Unfolding in five dazzlingly imagined chapters that encompass everything from silent-era expressionism to film noir to a delirious vampire love story shot in one of Bi’s signature long takes, Resurrection is a work of breathtaking imagination in which cinema is the ultimate portal to the unconscious mind.

Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By

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An epic, lyrical ode to amateur filmmakers who raise the quotidian to the highest levels of art, Flickering Ghosts of Loves Gone By is a personal and historical exploration of the home movie in all its unvarnished glory. Upon inheriting an enormous collection of amateur films, André Bonzel (codirector of Man Bites Dog) incorporated the work of complete strangers into a narrated montage of his own family’s century-long moving-image scrapbook. In tracing his own conflation of sex and cinema through his family history, Bonzel plumbs his—as well as hundreds of others’—attempts to both preserve and reshape reality on celluloid, while in the process uncovering buried secrets, forgotten legacies, and some of the deepest motivations for capturing fleeting, everyday moments through the magic of a camera.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Stella Dallas

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One of the silent era’s most popular and moving melodramas, the beautifully mounted original screen version of Olive Higgins Prouty’s oft-filmed novel was adapted by Frances Marion and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. An extraordinarily touching Belle Bennett stars as the everywoman heroine Stella, a small-town girl who moves up in the world when she marries the upper-crust Stephen Dallas (Ronald Colman), with whom she soon has a daughter. But a blue-blood marriage can’t change Stella’s coarse ways, leading to a wrenching choice between her daughter’s happiness and her own.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Return to Reason: Four Films by Man Ray (Man Ray, 2023)

Criterion Collection Edition #1291
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Cryptic narrative, dark eroticism, and playful abstraction come together in the swirling surrealist dreams of an avant-garde visionary.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Scores by the avant-rock band SQÜRL; an interview with its members, Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan; and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Three Noirs by Jacques Tourneur

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A master of mood, shadow, and dreamy ambiguity, French-born director Jacques Tourneur brought a sophisticated subtlety to his celebrated work in Hollywood. His command of atmosphere and darkly poetic sensibility were particularly suited to film noir, as seen in this trio of stylish, chiaroscuro-engraved favorites, including the stone-cold classic Out of the Past, a reverie of romantic doom starring genre icon Robert Mitchum in one of his definitive roles.

FEATURING: Out of the Past (1947), Berlin Express (1948), Nightfall (1956)

Emile de Antonio’s Cold War Counterculture

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A self-described “Marxist among capitalists,” documentarian Emile de Antonio wielded the camera as a weapon in his fight against America’s corrupt power structures and the Cold War establishment elite. Unabashedly aligning himself with the leftist movements of the 1960s and ’70s in contrast to the “objective” style of the then-dominant cinema verité movement, he made his films with raw, blunt force, deploying impactfully edited archival footage to examine everything from the assassination of John F. Kennedy (Rush to Judgment) to the horror of America’s war in Vietnam (In the Year of the Pig) to the radical ideology of the Weather Underground (Underground). Stark, uncompromising, and timely, de Antonio’s films question everything, digging into official narratives to reveal the hidden agendas and systemic rot lurking below.

FEATURING: Point of Order! (1964), Rush to Judgment (1967), In the Year of the Pig (1968), Millhouse (1971), Painters Painting (1972), Underground (1976), In the King of Prussia (1983), Mr. Hoover and I (1989)

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Yeast

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A girls’ trip goes to hell in this defiantly raw, warts-and-all portrait of toxic friendship from the director of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. A young Greta Gerwig stars, with Josh and Benny Safdie in supporting roles.

ANIME

*Gatchaman: The Movie**

WATCH NOW

Fans of classic anime will delight in this awesomely retro sci-fi extravaganza teeming with pop-psychedelic visuals and whiz-bang-pow action.

DOCUMENTARIES

Jane by Charlotte

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See actor, musician, and fashion icon Jane Birkin as never before: through the intimate, revealing lens of her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg.

SHORT FILMS

Prismatic Ground Presents

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One of the most exciting and adventurous film festivals to emerge in recent years, Prismatic Ground brings together aesthetically innovative, politically radical work at the intersection of experimental and documentary cinema. This selection of shorts from the festival’s first five editions offers an eclectic cross section of vital works by filmmakers whose approach to image-making eschews traditional narrative in favor of abstraction and sensation, showing how avant-garde techniques can be deployed to illuminate profound personal experiences as well as violent histories of colonialism, oppression, and dispossession. The latest additions from the festival’s 2025 edition confront topics as varied as class, labor, family, memory, landscape, history, consciousness, and resistance with rigorous attention to form and galvanizing emotional power. The sixth edition of Prismatic Ground runs from April 29–May 3, 2026.

NEWLY ADDED SHORTS: Kalighat Fetish (1999), Buseok (2024), endings (2024), Hemel (2024), typhoon diary 风球日记 (2024), Winter Portrait (2024), Concrete Resources (Thank you for keeping me a company of images) (2024), All Said Done (2025), Remote Views (2025), Tuktuit (2025)

Short Films by Sophy Romvari

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With her acclaimed debut feature, the heartbreaking family portrait Blue Heron (in theaters this April), Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari builds on her early short works to reveal an astonishing cinematic sensibility exquisitely attuned to the delicate, sensory details that shape experience. Frequently incorporating her own family’s history and photographs, these intimate, essayistic shorts—including Still Processing, a cathartic precursor to Blue Heron—muse on memory, grief, femininity, and the human-animal bond, often with touching vulnerability. Following in the self-reflexive footsteps of filmmakers like Agnès Varda and Chantal Akerman while evincing a modern generational sensibility all her own, they find a major artist in the process of forging her singular voice.

FEATURING: Nine Behind (2016), It’s Him (2017), Pumpkin Movie (2017), Grandma’s House (2018), Norman Norman (2018), In Dog Years (2019), Remembrance of József Romvári (2020), Still Processing (2020)

The Water Murmurs

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Winner of the Cannes Palme d’Or for Best Short Film, this dreamily poetic vision of aqueous apocalypse is a mesmerizing meditation on the fragility of both human connection and life on Earth.

MUSIC FILMS

Freakscene: The Story of Dinosaur Jr.

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Discover the behind-the-scenes story of the turbulent creative partnership that fueled the ferocious sound of one of the most influential rock bands of all time.

Tokyo Melody: A Film About Ryuichi Sakamoto

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Experience time, music, and Tokyo through the eyes and ears of visionary composer Ryuichi Sakamoto with this collage-like immersion into his world.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

Stranger Eyes

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A couple is drawn into a disturbing mystery when they begin receiving DVDs containing footage of their own lives in this gripping surveillance thriller for the digital age.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Premiering April 1 in Surreal Nature Documentaries: Grasshopper Republic

This strangely beautiful nature documentary with a science-fiction twist immerses the viewer into the world of Ugandan grasshopper hunters.

Testament: In the Twilight

Michael Koresky — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:23:00 +0000

Lynne Littman’s Testament (1983) opens on bedroom-window curtains silently fluttering in the morning sun. It’s a mundane image, intentionally unremarkable on its face, yet, as foreshadowed by James Horner’s mournful, “Taps”-like overture during the opening credits, there’s more to these billowing white symbols of suburban domesticity. Testament—a cinematic manifestation of what might be contemporary humanity’s greatest collective fear, nuclear annihilation, set largely within the walls of one average American family’s house—returns time and again to images of curtains, linens, and fabrics. As the film continues, though, they become increasingly fraught signs of decay: frayed and torn shirtsleeves, bloodstained towels, bedsheets used as death shrouds. Littman’s movie, one of American cinema’s most singularly unsparing and unbearably intimate works, transforms the safe space of the home into a battlefield of survival. It’s the end of the world as a lullaby of despair.

Films detailing what might happen in the lead-up to or fallout from an atomic blast in the Western hemisphere had constituted their own anxious subgenre for decades before Testament. Baby boomers had been learning to duck and cover under their school desks, growing up in an unprecedented atmosphere of existential dread. By the tail end of the 1950s, that dread had made its way to movie houses. Postnuclear melodramas like Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach and Ranald MacDougall’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil (both 1959) led to more sophisticated evocations like Sidney Lumet’s realist gut-churner Fail Safe and Stanley Kubrick’s absurdist Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (both 1964). British newcomer Peter Watkins’s forty-seven-minute The War Game (1966), which won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature (despite being neither a documentary nor a feature), remains the era’s most terrifying film of this type: made two decades after the United States’ strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, The War Game imitates a matter-of-fact BBC newsreel, depicting the horrific physical, psychological, and social disintegration of the populace in Kent following the detonation of a nuclear warhead. Mass starvation, radiation sickness, flash blindness, violently repressive government response to civil unrest—that’s entertainment? Maybe not, but such high-minded exploitation did make for meaningful, suspenseful social-issue cinema. By this time, the prolonged Cold War with the Soviet Union—and the panic stoked by 1962’s Cuban missile crisis—had escalated fears of atomic holocaust.

A second wave of movies stoking alarm about nuclear catastrophe exploded onto screens large and small in the early 1980s, reflecting the elevated tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S. and the United Kingdom in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s hard-line approaches to foreign policy. Reagan was now dubbing the USSR an “evil empire,” while stockpiling the U.S. military’s arsenal, nuclear and otherwise—hardly acts to inspire confidence that the world was on its way to peace. Highly rated made-for-television movies like The Day After (1983) and Threads (1984) captured the fraught imaginations of the American and British publics, respectively, with pitiless dramatizations of worst-case scenarios. Comprehensively detailed and sensationalistic, with expansive casts and multiple locations, these films aim for the panoramic. Testament operates from the opposite instinct, appealing to human fear and empathy by going as small as possible. Released in theaters two weeks before The Day After aired, Littman’s film presents the apocalypse from the perspective of a mother and her young children spending their final days on earth in one typical California suburb. There’s no war-room countdown, no conflicted bomber pilots, no president making last-ditch phone calls—just a restrained portrait of human collateral, the innocents caught in the crosshairs.

Littman made her debut with Number Our Days (1976), an alternately poignant and brassy rendering of a community of Jewish senior citizens in Venice, California, that gained her attention when it won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short. The significant amount of time that passed before Littman embarked upon directing her first feature speaks to the lack of opportunities then afforded to women directors—a reality that drove Littman to become one of the original six members of the Women’s Steering Committee in 1979. This subgroup of the Directors Guild of America, formed in response to the widespread gender imbalance in Hollywood, gathered data and eventually presented to the DGA the galling fact that 0.5 percent of film and TV projects from major distributors over the previous thirty years (1949–79) had been directed by women. The committee’s work led to lawsuits against Warner Bros. and Columbia Pictures for employment discrimination. Although both cases would be thrown out on technicalities in 1985, the committee’s efforts marked a historical pivot point, making a lot of important noise in the industry and entrenching Littman’s legacy beyond her work behind the camera.

Frustratingly, especially in light of the committee’s work, Testament would prove to be Littman’s only theatrical feature. Yet it’s one of the great directorial one-offs in American cinema. Littman had been inspired to make Testament after reading Carol Amen’s “The Last Testament” in Ms. magazine in August 1981. A terse, unsparing 3,800 words written in diary form, Amen’s short story imagines the point of view of a mother of three trying to maintain a semblance of order and humanity in the face of the unthinkable. Her husband, Tom, has gone on a work trip to San Francisco and will never come back. The neighborhood is spared the blast, but in the distance she sees something huge, something wrong: “I thought it would be like a giant mushroom, but it was more of an inverted mountain. I stood transfixed as its funnel pulled life from the place my husband had been at three o’clock.” There’s no visual grandiosity in Littman’s film, just a burst of light, but rarely has anything been more terrifying on-screen: it’s an indication that all can be lost in a literal flash.

The horror of Testament is so astonishingly effective because it springs from a believable domestic day-to-day. It’s a film that haunts in part because of its unerring authenticity, even if its speculative story could be considered science fiction. Anyone who has witnessed Testament has surely never forgotten it. Before I ever saw it, I remember, as a child, hearing my mother whisper its title like an awful secret; when she spoke of it, she wore an ashen expression usually reserved for the relating of a family tragedy. She had seen the film when it first aired on PBS’s American Playhouse in 1984, some months after its theatrical release in November 1983. Its status as forbidden object only enhanced my childhood curiosity. When I finally did manage to watch it—surreptitiously, out of parental eyeshot—its horrors were crystal clear, as were the reasons my mom wanted to shield me from it. Watching Testament as a child was a loss of innocence.

The opening passages of Testament are as realistic an evocation of white, middle-class California suburbia as can be seen in any film from the 1980s. The era’s consumerist trappings are everywhere: a mini-TV droning in the kitchen; the kids’ Fisher-Price record player spinning on the counter; a boom box blasting a cassette of Jane Fonda’s Workout, prodding mom Carol Wetherly (Jane Alexander) to get out of bed and plan for the day. The household is all chaos, the normal kind that will seem downright paradisiacal just twenty-four hours later: domestic annoyances over spilled milk and not enough toilet paper, minor-key marital squabbles between Carol and Tom (William Devane). Husband and wife will only have one moment of true intimacy, in bed in the middle of the night, when Carol relates her concerns about their son Brad’s upcoming birthday. Larger, if diffuse, stress points creep into the conversation—soon the boy will be old enough for the military draft. Despite such latent parental anxieties, and a simmering discontent already traceable in Alexander’s exquisitely unsentimental performance, there’s a beautifully drawn ease to Carol and Tom’s extended interaction here, making it even more dispiriting when, the next morning, Tom goes off to work with no fanfare—no kiss, no farewell—and never returns.

The beginning of the end of the world: Carol, daughter Mary Liz (Roxana Zal), and little Scottie (Lukas Haas) are watching a staticky Sesame Street, while middle child Brad (Ross Harris) tries to straighten the antenna to correct the image. The program is interrupted by an emergency broadcast alert matter-of-factly announcing detonations in New York and up and down the East Coast, and advising that telephone lines should be kept open “for official use.” The U.S. presidential seal appears, and, almost as quickly, the television zaps out. No address from the president, but the message is clear: this is a world in which official leadership is already a thing of the past. Then the blinding light, a wail of sirens, and the neighbors are convening on the street. A sad-eyed kid from next door, Larry (Mico Olmos), all alone, will ask Carol if he can stay with them until his parents return from San Francisco. Another neighbor, the elderly Henry (Leon Ames, from Meet Me in St. Louis and TV’s Life with Father, in a casting twist of the knife), will cling to hope via his ham radio, the community’s only connection to whatever is left of the outside world. We only know what they come to know: San Francisco’s gone silent; the nukes may have hit Yosemite. Spared the initial blast, they at first believe themselves to be the lucky ones. The remainder of the film slowly, incrementally, horribly refutes this.

A film of naturally overcast light (it really rained most of the shooting days, giving the movie an eerie, misty pallor), Testament remains painstakingly focused on the Wetherly household inside and out—the backyard inevitably becomes a child graveyard. Yet throughout there are gestures to the larger societal breakdowns experienced within the community: contentious town meetings, backed-up lines of cars waiting for gas, the hoarding of food and batteries, home invasions, cemeteries that become so full the town starts burning bodies. The film flirts with a gentle didacticism: kindly gas-station owner Mike (Mako) has a son with Down syndrome named Hiroshi (Gerry Murillo), whose name, changed from Amen’s story, is clearly meant to serve as a reminder of past nuclear horrors; the elementary-school play of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” (evoking the name of the California town where the movie is set, Hamlin) culminates with Scottie addressing the audience of bereft parents: “Your children are not dead. They will return. They are just waiting until the world deserves them.”

Testament might have been either just an admonitory sermon for nuclear disarmament or a mere catalog of horrors. Watching a family slowly die, one by one, of radiation poisoning could have seemed not only sadistic but also dramatically inert. Yet the miracle of Littman’s film, precisely edited by Suzanne Pettit to foreground the tightening sense of domestic claustrophobia, is that its unflinching willingness to burrow to our darkest fears is inseparable from its humane instincts. Its most disturbing moments reveal the terrible beauty of love: a neighbor (a young Kevin Costner) carrying a dresser drawer to use as a makeshift coffin for his newborn; Mary Liz, a teenager on the precipice of womanhood, asking her mother what sex is like, knowing she’ll never experience it herself; little Scottie being comforted in the middle of the night by his mother as he suffers diarrhea and bleeding (and the unbearably touching throwaway detail of their orphaned neighbor Larry trying to help by handing Scottie his teddy bear). This is the stuff that large-scale antinuclear dramas like Oppenheimer (2023) and A House of Dynamite (2025) scrupulously and quite intentionally avoid—they are, frankly, too scared to show the true human toll of destruction. Testament is fearless, and in its depiction of maternal determination in the face of doom, far more indelible. Littman reminds us that, in the world we’ve made, the end will come not with a resounding blast but a slow fade.

Near and Far: A Conversation with Dwayne LeBlanc

Julian Kimble — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:14:00 +0000

With a distinctive style that blends elements of realism and experimentation, Los Angeles native Dwyane LeBlanc explores themes that are deeply personal to him, including identity, distance, and responsibility. While speaking with him about his work, I discovered that the virtues that make him a bright light among his young generation of filmmakers surface quickly in conversation. He is naturally curious and speaks passionately about his craft. He is a thoughtful artist and a firm believer in intentionality, a quality that extends to his approach to camera placement and his richly detailed scripts. And his use of words, both in life and in his work, is never forced, so even a reference to Plato’s allegory of the cave is given a natural place in the flow of his characters’ conversations.

LeBlanc trained himself in filmmaking after he took a more active interest in the medium during college. He was later introduced to the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, and Chantal Akerman, who expanded his idea of what cinema could be. He has also drawn inspiration from the photography of Joel Meyerowitz, the compositions of artist David Hammons, and the writing of Ralph Ellison. But LeBlanc’s vision is all his own; his acclaimed short films Civic (2022) and Now, Hear Me Good (2025) are rooted in his experience as a first-generation Caribbean American.

Civic, shot entirely from the inside of a car, follows a contemplative young man named Booker (Barrington Darius) as he returns to South Central Los Angeles after a period away from the city and grapples with the emotional remove he now feels from his hometown. Now, Hear Me Good finds Booker living abroad in an unspecified setting, still wrestling with feelings of disconnection. An interest in ambition, migration, and displacement unites the films—and those themes turn up again in LeBlanc’s forthcoming You Do Not Exist, the final part of what LeBlanc considers a trilogy. “Civic is about coming back, Now, Hear Me Good is about going away, and You Do Not Exist is about what it means when you stay,” he says. “The notion of civic duty is connected to all three, and I think it comes back to the idea of shame and guilt, and how they come about, whether you’re an immigrant or not.”

With Civic and Now, Hear Me Good streaming on the Criterion Channel, I spoke to LeBlanc about the personal experiences that shaped the films, his approach to his art form, and the relationship between physical and cultural proximity.

I know first-generation people who have talked about wanting to fit into Western norms while also maintaining the traditions their immigrant parents instilled in them, or wanting to break free when they’ve been conditioned to assimilate. How did being a first-generation Caribbean American influence the perspective of Civic and Now, Hear Me Good?

All of my family is from the island of Dominica or neighboring islands. I remember very distinctly, in first grade, my friends telling me how I was saying a word strangely. I couldn’t understand what they meant, but then it clicked, and I realized I’m different from my surroundings. From that moment on, I felt a push and pull inside of me.

We didn’t celebrate holidays the same way, and we didn’t have the same foods. I started to notice those differences. So I think, in my early grade-school years, there was a lot of resistance to embracing my culture, and instead I embraced what it means to be an American. But once you start to grow a little bit past that and realize that the uniqueness of your cultural background is what makes you who you are, then you really start to hold on to those things.

When I started to consume art and think about cinema, novels, paintings, photography, I noticed that there were certain themes that kept coming up in certain movies that really spoke to that experience. After I started creating movies, but before I made Civic, I started to realize that this was consistent in all of the things I’ve made.

What was your relationship with film like when you were growing up?: It was very standard. As a kid, I liked movies just like anyone else: Jaws, E.T. I remember when I was going to college, I loved film and gravitated to it, but I never knew, especially as an immigrant, that it could be a career. You don’t think movies are manmade; they’re just these magical things that arrive on your TV set. But you notice the logos before and after the film, or in the commercials, so you realize it is a job and you can probably learn it. I pursued art in school, but it wasn’t until I left corporate America that I started to do so more seriously.

I watched all the karate movies, all the westerns—these genres I’d heard about and could hold on to. It wasn’t until a friend of mine sent me a list of films—the Fellinis, the Godards, the Antonionis, the Vardas—that my education started to evolve. I always give credit to the film that broke open my consciousness about what a film could do or be: Chantal Akerman’s La chambre. It was unlike anything I’d seen, but I felt like I understood what it was doing. It’s a silent film composed of one shot that rotates 360 degrees in a woman’s apartment; it stops at one point, then rotates the other way. I didn’t know films could operate like that. Without knowing what I was searching for, that film set me off on my path.

Are there any cinematographers who have influenced the way your films look and feel?: Malik Hassan Sayeed, who worked on Belly. It’s so underrated as a work of image-making. It has some of the most complex images I think we’ve been offered in cinema. I also think of Arthur Jafa’s work on Crooklyn. The detail, the lighting, the compositions—that film really taught me about cinematography and what can be done within the frame. Then, obviously, Daughters of the Dust [also shot by Jafa].

There’s one Charles Burnett short film called Several Friends that I think—on the level of its cinematography [by Jim Watkins], and in terms of its depiction of the quotidian—really stands out. There’s a small moment in that film where somebody’s just moving a bottle cap on the table. The fact that it’s framed and given the same amount of attention as a face or another major detail influenced a lot of how I approach cinema. And his work on Killer of Sheep.

There’s a film I want to mention, Deshotten 1.0. Malik and A. J. [Jafa] worked on that. It’s very dramatic in a lot of ways. But it’s one of the greatest short films in terms of the utilization of form, as well as camera technique. There’s a character in a liminal state who’s experienced something very violent, and he’s drifting in between his reality along with alternative realities of what happened to him. I studied it a lot before I made Civic—frame by frame, what was happening in focus, what was happening in sound, how it was sequenced.

I have to give Malik and A. J. their flowers. I know they aren’t necessarily lesser-known names, but we know them because they put in the work, and I want to give them the credit because they influenced me a lot.

You received a production grant for Civic and participated in a lab organized through Netflix and Ghetto Film School’s partnership. You were also a part of Berlinale Talents, another developmental program. Netflix and Berlinale exist at opposite ends of the spectrum. How did you balance Netflix’s more commercial approach with Berlinale’s art-house sensibilities?: That was one of the most incredible moments of my life. I used to say that I always wanted to be on the fence, the border between the two worlds: I wanted to make things that would speak to my mom, my friends, and my community while also staying true to the cinema and art I was drawn to. I wanted all of those things in the room at the same time.

Now, balancing those two worlds can feel overwhelming. And Berlinale isn’t necessarily a place where you’re going to see my community, period. People like me aren’t invited, and if they were there, they probably wouldn’t necessarily feel welcome. Berlinale was happening at the same exact time that I got the grant for the Netflix program, which came with the lab. I was ending Zooms from the Berlinale lab and going into meetings for the Netflix lab. At Netflix, you might get the conventional note about communicating an arc or detail to their audience. Berlinale gave such subtle notes, but they were also very tied to story and things under the surface of what you might expect an American script to attack.

It was so fascinating to hear the difference between what might interest an audience like the one at Berlinale and what would interest Netflix. In the end, you get what you’d expect. I think one of the first notes I got from Netflix when I sent the director’s cut of Civic was “Do you have any more coverage on these scenes?” And I was like, “No, I don’t. These are very specific angles.” The limitations were a concern for them, but I saw those limitations as a strength. I think, ultimately, the answer was that Netflix wanted more roundedness, more 360. Berlinale leaned on the specificity: yes, let’s do the silhouette, but what does that mean?

There are several tight shots in Civic because the camera never leaves the car. Can you talk about proximity and space in both films, and how they create a sense of intimacy between the characters as well as between them and the audience?: There were character details that Andrew Yuyi Truong and I wrote into the shot list. We approached it as if we were writing a text: we described what the identity of the camera was, and how that related to the audience’s relationship with the film. In Civic, we wrote the camera as if it were a ghost entity that had its own interests, perspective, and relationship with Booker. Sometimes the camera just wants to focus on that without framing it in a conventional way.

The idea of cultural and physical proximity is important to me. It’s interesting to invite the audience into the car and put them next to the characters, but the characters aren’t necessarily speaking to them. The meaning of certain details in what two characters are saying to one another might not be clear to an audience in, say, France or Brazil. Certain things in our community may translate more directly; we might understand a nuance in a way that another audience member can’t. I think that kind of culturally specific language, and that kind of drifting in between, allows for two things. One is for the audience to be able to trust in the film’s journey while slipping in and out of their own consciousness, and to think about what they might say or do in that same circumstance. It also allows the audience to invite themselves into the movie while being aware of the character’s experience.

In Now, Hear Me Good, the camera was an uninvited guest. It’s almost as if me and you were going to a party thrown by a good friend of mine you didn’t know, then I couldn’t make it at the last minute but said you should still go because they’re good people. There’s a little loneliness, but the party is still appealing. You don’t feel invasive, but no one’s necessarily speaking to you all the time. You’re in a safe space. Even though you’re very close to the characters, you may not be invited into some of the language they share.

Top of page: Civic; above: Now, Hear Me Good

You’ve said Now, Hear Me Good is about exile. Does it tap into the Baldwinian concept of feeling liberated by leaving home while also wrestling with the challenges?

Absolutely. We all have to find a moment of solitude, in some way. Some people find it through geographical means; they go away, as James Baldwin did. He thought he would’ve died if he didn’t leave New York. He meant that literally but also metaphorically. There was something he felt he couldn’t achieve in America, so he went to be an invisible man in another space. What’s interesting about that, especially thinking about Ralph Ellison and Baldwin, when talking about the duality of visibility: there’s a freedom to being something people disregard and don’t see, especially when you’re coming from America.

So even though Booker is dealing with his own cultural duality, he’s still trying to find himself so he’s going somewhere else to be in complete solitude. I think about John Coltrane’s idea of woodshedding [an artist’s practice of self-imposed solitude for the purpose of improving their craft]. Toni Morrison talked about it. A lot of our great artists have spoken about the need to woodshed. Some people don’t have the luxury to do it all the time, but there are some artists who talk about shutting the world out in order to access a deeper understanding of who they are. In Now, Hear Me Good, Booker doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He’s not an underdog; he has all the accolades one could probably ask for in their late twenties or early thirties. But there’s still misalignment: he’s gained these accolades, but there’s still something missing regarding who he is.

There’s this Sade quote that’s been bubbling up on social media the last couple of days about the idea of stepping away, embracing that, and knowing that there’s plenty to come back to. Dave Chappelle has done it. So many different artists have stepped away from the spotlight, then figured something out and come back with a new sense of themselves and the world around them. I used the idea of the artist in this film as an easy, tangible way to see that someone is going to work on themselves and their craft, but it’s really just a larger metaphor for our internal instruments. It’s a luxury, but one I think we all should give ourselves space for.

Watching Civic, I got the sense that music was Booker’s passion. There’s a scene where his friend Tee plays some old music and they discuss the contents of an old hard drive. It would be easy to assume that Booker is involved in hip-hop, given what we learn there. Why did you wait to disclose what took him away from South Central?: I love that you made that connection because it’s not something I’ve talked to anybody about. I used to make music during a time in LA when there were people around me who are huge stars now, but I knew internally that life wasn’t for me. But imagine going off onto the buoy: Yo, I’m just out here in the ocean. I really don’t know what direction I’m going in. The Bookers in all three films are different and come from different universes with relationships to migration. So the Booker from Civic isn’t necessarily the Booker from Now, Hear Me Good, though they do have some kind of spiritual connection and through line. Barrington and I defined what the Booker in Civic went away to do, and we utilized that in our own internal work in terms of rehearsals and the spiritual effort needed to make the film deeper.

We did the same work with Now, Hear Me Good. We completely got rid of what we thought of for Civic and redefined who Booker was. The temperament is similar, but we started from scratch in a way. But there are some branches that connect each film, and it’s music in these two, so I’m so excited that you found that.

Did you always envision this as a trilogy, and how did Civic become the first installment?: Civic took years to make. I didn’t go to film school or art school, so there was much more experimentation. After the third time Civic failed to be made, which was during COVID, I had a ritual where I’d sit in my backyard, eat a fruit in the morning, and read a book. The book that moved me the most was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I’d read it before, but this time, I decided to pull out my highlighters and pens to think about it in a new way. What I realized about the book was the number of literary connections to visibility.

So I was sitting under the flight path of LAX, looking up and seeing these planes fly, wondering where people were going. Then I started thinking about my own relationship with migration and identity. I started to take photographs for what became You Do Not Exist and realized what I was trying to do would make more sense as separate films, but there was something to be said about a triangular connection where we look at migration three different ways and what happens to a character as you turn the prism at a different angle. That moment allowed me to reset and rethink what I was trying to do as a filmmaker, which became the genesis of making Civic the coming-home story.

I’m really grateful, because I feel like if I rushed and made it, I might not have had that epiphany. I was also inspired by Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker Trilogy and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Black Flame trilogy, which show the power of expanding from an isolated idea.

The Man Who Wasn’t There: The Barber of Santa Rosa

Laura Lippman — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 12:49:00 +0000

Has there ever been a more aptly named film than The Man Who Wasn’t There? The title character, Ed Crane, is as pale and insubstantial as the long ash on his ever-present cigarette. A barber by trade, he is laconic to a fault, with the kind of face that a client doesn’t recognize mere hours after a haircut. He has no vices. (Smoking isn’t a vice in 1949 Santa Rosa, California.) He has no real passions. His marriage is sexless, and he’s a cuckold. When Birdy, a teenager he is trying to mentor, attempts to fellate him while he’s driving, he screams “Heavens to Betsy!” and runs the car off the road.

Only one thing awakens desire-cum-criminality in Ed, and it’s the classic noir dream of—checks notes—co-owning a dry-cleaning franchise.

You heard that right. Not a big score. Not another man’s wife. Not a big score and another man’s wife. Ed wants to leave his brother-in-law’s barbershop behind and devote himself to the futuristic enterprise of cleaning clothes without immersing them in water.

The only catch is that it will cost $10,000—about $136,000 in 2025 dollars—to become the silent partner of the clearly shady stranger offering him this opportunity. That’s not an easy amount to come by when you’re second chair in a barbershop.

Silhouetted in a bathroom doorway, all shadow, Ed smokes while his wife soaks in the tub behind him. “Dry cleaning,” he says to himself. “Was I crazy to be thinking about it?” He continues to silently ponder the method’s too-good-to-be-true promises as he shaves his wife’s calves in a way that suggests this is a matter-of-fact routine in the Crane household. “It was clean.” (Razor stroke.) “No water.” (Razor stroke.) “Chemicals.” (Dips razor in bathwater to rinse.)

“Give me a drag,” his wife, Doris, demands. He hands over his beloved cigarette, but, as with the shaving, there’s nothing erotic or even intimate about the interaction.

Ed Crane is, in short, a schnook. But unlike most noir protagonists, he knows he’s a schnook. He has the stones to try to blackmail his way to his dream, sending his wife’s lover/boss, Big Dave, an anonymous note that threatens to expose their affair if he doesn’t come up with some cash. But when it all goes south—very, very quickly—he’s stymied.

Ed kills Big Dave when the latter confronts him over his scheme, then doesn’t come forward when Doris is accused of the murder. Eventually charged and convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, he seems resigned to his death sentence, maybe even relieved. It turns out that the voice-over throughout the film—in which Ed speaks far more than he ever did in real life—is a confession for a men’s magazine, written for a nickel a word.

“I’m glad that this men’s magazine paid me to tell my story,” Ed writes from his prison cell. “Writing it has helped me sort it all out . . . Now all the disconnected things seem to hook up . . . It’s like pulling away from the maze . . . You get some distance on it, and all those twists and turns, why, they’re the shape of your life. It’s hard to explain. But seeing it whole gives you some peace.”

The Man Who Wasn’t There was the Coen brothers’ ninth film, and it’s the only black-and-white one they have collaborated on to date. By the time they started production in 2000, they had already tackled two of the mid-twentieth century’s three literary masters of crime/noir: Dashiell Hammett (1984’s Blood Simple, 1990’s Miller’s Crossing) and Raymond Chandler (1998’s The Big Lebowski). So perhaps an homage to James M. Cain was inevitable. It’s even rumored that the Coens considered making a new adaptation of Cain’s fourth novel, Mildred Pierce.

Yet the first inspiration for The Man Who Wasn’t There was reportedly a vintage barbershop poster used as set dressing for The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). I say “reportedly” because there are only two brief barbershop scenes in Hudsucker, and no such poster is visible. A down-the-rabbit-hole search of eBay, Etsy, Pinterest, and other internet marketplaces yielded some possibilities, but none had the exact roster of haircuts that Ed wearily intones as he clips and smokes, smokes and clips: “The butch, or the heinie, the flattop, the Ivy, the crew, the vanguard, the junior contour, and, occasionally, the executive contour.”

Other named influences for TMWWT include the films Shadow of a Doubt and Detour, but Joel Coen has specified that it was the novels of James M. Cain, not their film adaptations, that were an “obvious” inspiration, especially in their attention to the quotidian world of work.

“He wrote novels about domestic murders and was very interested in people’s day-to-day existence,” Coen said in a BBC interview. “Their businesses: restaurants, insurance, banking, or being an opera singer. That was a big element in the novels he wrote, and was definitely something we were thinking about here.” In other words: Are we what we do? “I was the barber,” Ed states at one point, as if it is his only identity. A barber who, not so incidentally, is absolutely creeped out by human hair.

TMWWT is full of treats for the Cain cognoscenti—a death-house confession by a technically innocent man (The Postman Always Rings Twice), a bookkeeping scandal and a disastrous musical audition (Mildred Pierce). Nirdlingers, the name of the department store where Ed’s wife keeps the books—under the oversight of her lover, Big Dave—echoes the married surname of Phyllis, the femme fatale in Cain’s Double Indemnity. (In the film, she was Dietrichson, and a variation of that name shows up here, too, attached to a medical examiner who gives Ed disturbing news after his falsely accused wife commits suicide in jail.)

Cain, a journalist and a protégé of H. L. Mencken’s, had a lot of jobs himself—public-utility ledger clerk, road inspector, high-school principal, and Victrola salesman, to name just a few—before he found sudden literary success in 1934 with the publication of The Postman Always Rings Twice.

But the one gig he could never land was as a scriptwriter on the movies based on his work. Billy Wilder wanted Cain to write Double Indemnity with him, but Cain was under contract to a different studio at the time. Wilder ended up working with Raymond Chandler, who realized Cain’s dialogue did not work in films. “Nothing could be more natural and easy and to the point on paper, and yet it doesn’t quite play,” Chandler wrote Cain in 1944. “These unevenly shaped hunks of quick-moving speech hit the eye with a sort of explosive effect. You read the stuff in batches, not in individual speech and counterspeech. On the screen, this is all lost.” Chandler was proved right when Cain’s work came back into fashion in the 1980s; those faithful-to-a-fault adaptations tended to be laughable or inert.

TMWWT manages the same deft trick that Chandler’s screenplay for Double Indemnity did: it feels like a Cain story, but it hasn’t fallen into the trap of trying to replicate his prose or his plots. It pays homage to Cain’s early (and best) books by channeling Cain’s commitment to keeping his work lean, to the point that he famously jettisoned the word said whenever possible. (“Well, why all this saysing?” he wrote in the 1946 preface to The Butterfly. “With quotes around it, would they be gargling it?”)

In fact, TMWWT seems downright skeptical of its talky men—Ed’s brother-in-law (Michael Badalucco), who has the number one chair in the barbershop; Big Dave (James Gandolfini), whose wartime stories are all lies; the “pansy” (Jon Polito) who’s peddling dry cleaning; the expensive lawyer (Tony Shalhoub) who is bummed not by his client’s suicide but by the fact that it renders moot his brilliant arguments, which he had planned to base on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It’s not quite fair to say they’re all talk, especially Big Dave, but they’re mostly talk.

The film belongs to its two most reticent characters, Ed (played by Billy Bob Thornton) and Doris (Frances McDormand, working with the Coens for the first time since 1996’s Fargo). In their scenes, the screenplay finds devastating power in the words not said—arrangements hinted at, dreams never realized. TMWWT, which was shot by Roger Deakins on color stock, then printed in black and white, is a noir in which light—a sun-bleached meadow, a white execution chamber—is as important as shadows, maybe more so.

In one of the film’s most haunting moments, Ed returns to his home after killing Big Dave in what is arguably self-defense. He studies his wife, who is sleeping off a drunken afternoon. (Drunkenness is not uncommon for Doris, who believes there is no afterlife, and the only real reward in this one is Tuesday-night bingo.) Ed recalls how she suggested marriage after dating him for only a few weeks. “I said, ‘Don’t you want to get to know me more?’ She said, ‘Why? Does it get better?’ She looked at me as if I was a dope, which I never really minded from her.”

Some critics have argued that Ed is a closeted gay man, but that seems a little on the nose to me. (When Ed is propositioned by the man dangling the dry-cleaning franchise, his response is measured, controlled: “Was that a pass? . . . Well, you’re out of line, mister.”) His interest in the musical career of the beautiful Birdy Abundas (Scarlett Johansson) is actually just that, a belief in her talent, which he has vastly overrated. As played by Thornton in what is arguably the best performance of his career, Ed seems asexual, baffled by the dirty business of sex and the complicated codes of manhood. In this barbershop, the poster on the wall is an ad, probably ripped from a men’s magazine by his brother-in-law: “Lend Me 15 Minutes a Day . . . and I’ll prove I can make you a NEW MAN.”

What if Ed, who at one point calls himself a ghost, isn’t a man at all, but someone so alienated from the world around him that he might as well be an actual alien? TMWWT is filled with visual references to flying saucers, real and imagined. Its first shot, of a whirling barber pole, feels like a beam of light from a spaceship, lifting us up, up, up to places unknown. A hubcap loosened by an accident appears to turn into a flying saucer. While flipping through Life magazine, Ed happens on an account of the strange events in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947.

There’s even a specific story of an alien visitation in TMWWT. After Big Dave’s murder, his wife arrives on Ed’s doorstep late at night and tells him that her husband was once abducted by “creatures” from a spaceship and subjected to treatment she refuses to describe. “Big Dave,” says the wide-eyed Ann (Katherine Borowitz), “never touched me again.” Ed looks aghast. Is he uneasy because he’s talking to the woman he made a widow, uncomfortable with her confidences, or unnerved by some other secret?

The night before his execution, Ed dreams that he is free to wander through an empty, unguarded prison. He finds his way to the yard, where a bright, starlike object is revealed to be a whirling spaceship. He is then awakened from his dream by a priest and two guards, who lead him to that improbably white, almost formless chamber where he is strapped to the electric chair. A guard shaves Ed’s legs much as Ed once shaved Doris’s—stroke, stroke, rinse.

“I don’t know where I’m being taken, I don’t know what I’ll find beyond the earth and sky, but I’m not afraid to go,” his voice-over informs us, and it’s unclear whether this is part of his paid-for confession or an interior monologue. “Maybe the things I don’t understand will be clearer there . . . Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don’t have words for here.”

Where is “here”—and where is there? What does he mean by “taken,” a strange word for one’s execution? How can Doris be encountered in an afterlife in which she never believed? Has Ed found faith? Is he, in his own words, pulling away from the maze and seeing all the connections, as if from a great height? Or is he completing the classic arc of other cinematic extraterrestrials and being summoned home?

The executioner pulls the switch. (At least, he seems to—we see him reaching for it but not the actual flip.) Ed Crane heads into—no, disappears into—the light, the blindingly white light.

Network: Back to the Future

Jamelle Bouie — Tue, 24 Feb 2026 07:56:00 +0000

“In this twilight of the capitalist epoch,” mused Michael Harrington, the socialist writer and journalist, in 1976, “there is a decline in religious commitment, in moral conviction, indeed in almost any kind of belief. The old order has died in the realm of the spirit long before the new order has occurred in the realm of politics and the economy.”

Harrington’s observation, from his book The Twilight of Capitalism, is better framed as a question: If the old society is gone, what exactly are we building in its place? His solution was a democratic transformation of the economy. Released the same year as Harrington’s book, Network gives a different spin on the same question and provides not so much an answer as a sharp, cynical, and bleakly comic view of the world to come.

Truth be told, Network feels a little less like a film than it does an extended rant, bellowed in lyrical rage by its principal creative voice, Paddy Chayefsky, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist, whose work in film, television, and theater spanned three decades and earned him, among other accolades, three Academy Awards.

This is not to diminish director Sidney Lumet’s contribution to the film. He made more classics than perhaps any Hollywood craftsman of his generation—a short list of his best work includes 12 Angry Men (1957), The Pawnbroker (1964), Fail Safe (1964), Serpico (1973), and Dog Day Afternoon (1975)—and could unlock the emotional and thematic core of almost any story. Working across genres with an unobtrusive style, Lumet was a master of the character study, always interested in the emotional truth behind the drama. Not surprisingly, he was as eager to work with writers as he was with actors; in his wonderfully practical memoir, Making Movies, he notes, in a nod to Chayefsky, that his respect for writers “would grow so great during our working time that I’d want them in on every aspect of the production.”

Lumet’s preoccupation with finding, in his words, the “closeness needed for private, emotional revelations” imbues Chayefsky’s script with a potency that is as compelling now as it was a half century ago. Read on the page, Chayefsky’s characters can feel like ciphers—mouthpieces for his grievances about the shallow and sensationalist direction of the nation’s media and, by extension, the country at large. But Lumet’s players—chief among them William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Beatrice Straight, Peter Finch, and Ned Beatty—bring layers of humanity that ground the film in something beyond ideology.

Consider a confrontation that Holden’s world-weary television news chief Max Schumacher has with his wife, played by Straight. As Holden confesses his affair with Dunaway’s news executive, Diana Christensen, Straight releases a lifetime’s worth of frustration and resentment in a short scene. It is a powerful moment that brings us, the audience, into a deeply felt emotional reality—a necessary balance for a film that reaches absurd heights. (It is also the moment that earned Straight her first and only Academy Award.)

Indeed, for as much as the cultural memory of Network is understandably centered on Finch’s electrifying performance as Howard Beale, the failed newsman whose self-destructive mania is harnessed for ratings (he is “the mad prophet of the airwaves”), the film is much more a drama of alienation and generational conflict than it is a straight satire of American news, media, and corporate culture.

Network opens with an image of a more staid and stable time. Four newsmen, four news networks, delivering the day’s headlines in a measured, steady cadence of assumed authority. Three of them are faces from the reality we know—Howard K. Smith, John Chancellor, and, of course, Walter Cronkite—and one of them is the catalyst of the story we’re about to experience, Howard Beale.

“In his time,” we’re told in the film’s opening narration, “Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT rating of sixteen and a twenty-eight audience share.” Now he is on the decline. “In 1969 . . . he fell to a twenty-two share. The following year his wife died, and he was left a childless widower with an eight rating and a twelve share.” As our tale begins, Beale is “morose and isolated,” and on the way out. Schumacher, the head of news for Union Broadcasting Systems and an old friend of Beale’s, breaks the news. And as they drink, commiserate, and reminisce—two piss-drunk middle-aged men, ambling through a now unrecognizably deserted Midtown Manhattan—Beale says that he will, on his last day, “blow my brains out on the air, right in the middle of the seven o’clock news.”

Max laughs—but it isn’t a joke. The next evening, and to the disbelief of producers and studio executives, Beale tells his audience that he intends to kill himself on-air: “Ladies and gentlemen, I would like at this moment to announce that I will be retiring from this program in two weeks’ time because of poor ratings. And since this show was the only thing I had going for me in my life, I have decided to kill myself.”

Thus begins the strange tale of Howard Beale, whose life and eventual death structure Network, which moves forward in episodic fashion. But more important to the overall narrative of the film—that is, most central to what Network appears to be saying—is the relationship between Max and Diana, a thematic stand-in of sorts for the clash between tradition and the imperatives of capital.

Sidelined from his position at UBS after the station is acquired by the Communications Corporation of America—a large, profit-maximizing company—Max is struggling to find some purpose as he enters the final chapters of his life. Diana, fully aligned with CCA, sees the news as little more than organized spectacle. Whether it informs is less important than whether it entertains, and Diana wants to bring the most absurd and bombastic material possible to television.

“Look, we’ve got a bunch of hobgoblin radicals called the Ecumenical Liberation Army who go around taking home movies of themselves robbing banks,” she quips at one point, brainstorming her next idea. “We’d open each week’s segment with that authentic footage, hire a couple of writers to write some story behind that footage, and we’ve got ourselves a series.”

Or, as she says to Max as she pitches her plan to make Beale a bona fide star, “TV is showbiz, and even the news has to have a little showmanship.”

Diana—cold, ruthless, and seemingly indifferent to old standards of decency and propriety—carries Chayefsky’s most bitter critiques of American society. She, herself, embodies what he clearly sees as a kind of nihilism. “I’m not sure she’s capable of any real feelings,” says Max, acting as author insert. “She’s the television generation. She learned life from Bugs Bunny. The only reality she knows is what comes over her TV set.” It is to her tremendous credit that Dunaway does not try to soften Diana whatsoever. She is as hard as she’s written. What Dunaway does is show the subtle cracks in the facade—and Diana’s decision to patch them back up, to stay the course for the sake of her ambition.

Diana is the next generation of American leaders, Chayefsky is screaming, a creature whose entire experience of the world is mediated by screens and broadcasts—who struggles to understand sincere human emotion and whose apparent cosmopolitanism simply enables her to appropriate and commodify an ever-growing set of materials. To that point, we see Diana try to hash out a deal with the Ecumenical Liberation Army, in a farcical scene of hard-nosed negotiation between a television producer and a group of communist radicals painted in such broad strokes that it reads as outright satire (with not a small amount of contempt for the style and posturing of the far left in that historical moment). The message, however, is clear enough: however much they might kill and steal, what matters most for Diana and the people she represents is that they can titillate and excite an audience.

A core argument of the film, in fact, concerns the power of capital to capture and co-opt any message, regardless of sincerity or original intent. There is a reason that the most memorable part of the film is Howard Beale’s famous cry, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore.” This is remembered as a statement of populist frustration. (And accordingly, the entire speech is a distinctly American brew of both reactionary anger at social disorder and open contempt for political action.) But what’s critical, in the film, is that Beale’s anger is quickly transformed into yet another product to sell to an audience, this one in the form of the Network News Hour, featuring Sybil the Soothsayer. Viewers can tune in to hear one of Beale’s jeremiads and then turn back to their lives, made fresh through secondhand catharsis.

Nothing in the world of Network—nor, it seems, in the real world—can overcome the power of market forces. This observation forms the basis of the film’s second most memorable moment: the confrontation between Beale and Beatty’s Arthur Jensen, chairman of CCA. Possessed of the delusion that he was truly independent, Beale had begun ranting against the financial interests of the company upon learning that it was to be acquired by a Saudi conglomerate. Beatty, in a commanding monologue performed with Old Testament authority, explains to Beale that he is meddling “with the primal forces of nature.”

“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples! There are no nations! There are no peoples!” Jensen roars. “You get up on your little twenty-one-inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.”

This, too, feels as if Chayefsky is speaking directly to his audience. That their sense of nationhood—their sense of racial or ethnic or religious identity—is nothing in the face of the relentless and all-consuming demands of capital accumulation. And that we’re heading toward a world where, in Chayefsky’s words as spoken by Jensen, “all men will work to serve a common profit” and where “all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”

You could even say that in Jensen’s monologue we are seeing a vision of what scholars would come to call the neoliberal order, the rise of a creed that, as the historian Gary Gerstle writes, “prizes free trade and the free movement of capital, goods, and people” and “calls explicitly for unleashing capitalism’s power.”

This gets to what is remarkable about Network and Chayefsky’s vision. With little more than a simple extrapolation of existing trends—the growing corporate ownership of news—he was able to capture something true and still-recognizable about the way American society would develop, about the way we would respond to the collapse of the old order. Not, as Harrington hoped, with a renewed solidarity but with the total collapse of standards, both for our institutions and for ourselves.

Network was received rapturously by critics and audiences, who saw the film as a sharp satire of the excesses of their time. There were dissenters—Pauline Kael thought the film was preachy and overbearing—but it went on to win three of four acting Oscars at the forty-ninth Academy Awards as well as a screenplay award for Chayefsky. And it stands as one of the great, and most prescient, films of the decade, a glimpse into our present of corporate consolidation.

Ultimately, Max and Diana cannot sustain their affair or their relationship. He is old and she is young, and however much he might love her, her worldview is simply too alien for him to live with. “You are television incarnate, Diana, indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer.”

He might as well be speaking to our modern purveyors of news and entertainment, the spiritual descendants of Diana Christensen who can hardly distinguish between truth and spectacle, and whose obsession with the latter brought this image-obsessed carnival atmosphere into the heart of our politics as well.

After his confrontation with Jensen, Beale returns to television yet again a new man, preaching the gospel of the shareholder—“corporate cosmology.” It is a disaster. His ratings are in free fall. Frank Hackett, a network vice president played by Robert Duvall, and the other executives at CCA agree that they must cut him loose. After a long pause, Hackett sighs that the only way to make this happen is to kill him. Diana, naturally, makes a suggestion. “Well, what do you fellows say to an assassination?”

They debate the logistics, the implications, and above all, the effect on profits. Hackett calls the question: “Well, the issue is, shall we kill Howard Beale or not? I’d like to hear some more opinions on that.”

“I don’t see we have any option, Frank,” says Diana. “Let’s kill the son of a bitch.”

As promised, Beale dies on-air—albeit not by his own hand. He is killed by the same communist revolutionaries employed by the network. And he becomes, in the words of our narrator, “the first known instance of a man killed because he had lousy ratings.”

One imagines, however, that the final show itself was a hit. The network, no doubt, was pleased.

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