Much like the B movies of the 1940s and 1950s that preceded them in spirit, runtime, and budget, made-for-TV movies included a lot of dross and dullness, and you could drive yourself mad if you took in every disaster-movie knockoff, failed pilot, and reactionary domestic comedy that aired during the decade. But, like those earlier theatrical films, the made-for-TV movie produced a bounty of simple and sometimes unexpected pleasures—if not as much subversion, thanks to the restrictions of the FCC and the whims of sponsors.

On any given evening during the 1970s, you could watch films written by James L. Brooks (Thursday’s Game), Melvin Van Peebles (Just an Old Sweet Song), or Joan Rivers (The Girl Most Likely to . . .); be introduced to the directorial talents of Steven Spielberg (Duel, included here) and Michael Mann (The Jericho Mile); or, if you were really paying attention, notice that some frequent helmers like John Llewellyn Moxey (Nightmare in Badham County) and Lamont Johnson (That Certain Summer) often turned out work that was a cut above.

And though TV movies were made in every genre, those that lasted the longest in the cultural imaginary—thanks to their often-traumatizing impact on younger viewers—were the horror and thriller films. Gentler cousins to the independent horror pictures then playing drive-ins and grindhouses, the best made-for-TV thrillers were modest nailbiters that carried on the legacy of anthology series from the fifties and sixties like The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. (Indeed, many of the talent associated with those programs continued to work on TV features, most notably screenwriter Richard Matheson, who wrote Duel.)

Some of the era’s emerging indie-horror auteurs made work for the small screen during the decade as well: our series includes John Carpenter’s Someone’s Watching Me! (1978) and Tobe Hooper’s two-part Salem’s Lot (1979), which foreshadowed the run of nineties network miniseries adapted from Stephen King novels. Though certainly more restrained than Halloween (1978) and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), these works provide a glimpse into the more classical aspects of each filmmaker’s style, and the skill and craft that were sometimes overlooked in the initial critical reaction to their breakthrough theatrical features.

Broadcast networks would continue airing TV films well past the 1970s, and while there are highlights to be found in later years—Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981), included here, is one the last great network TV terror films, and The Day After (1983) scarred a generation with its vision of nuclear war—their golden age is generally thought to have ended by the 1980s. The form largely shifted to cable, and the films aired by the likes of HBO, Showtime, USA Network, the Disney Channel, and, most prominently, Lifetime and Hallmark reflect subtle but significant shifts in production, content, and viewership.

Despite its richness—and the heroic scholarship of champions of the form like Amanda Reyes—the made-for-TV movie remains a largely unexplored cavern of cinema history, doomed to oblivion by the complexities of licensing. Considered more disposable than theatrical features or episodic television, produced by a mixture of long-defunct production companies and subsequently conglomerated studio divisions, and often contractually uncleared for theatrical exhibition or “new media,” most classic made-for-TV movies remain lost and abandoned in a world where streaming and physical media seem capable of even the most unlikely resurrections.

Fortunately, that situation does not apply across the board, and we’ve been able to put together a creepily compact collection of highlights from the golden age of the TV terror film for you to enjoy on the Criterion Channel—and you still won’t have to leave home to watch them. Here are two of my favorites from the series.

Duel (Steven Spielberg, 1971)

Duel is often remembered as the debut that immediately put Steven Spielberg on the map, but that’s not entirely correct. While executives at Universal were impressed enough by the film to give Spielberg the budget to shoot fifteen more minutes to flesh it out for a theatrical release—the version presented here—his first direct-to-theaters feature didn’t come until three years later, and he helmed two feature-length episodes of Columbo and The Name of the Game prior to Duel, and directed two more TV movies (1972’s Something Evil and 1973’s Savage) after it. While most of this surrounding work ranges from competent to dull, there is a particularly brilliant scene at the start of that Columbo episode in which Spielberg cuts back and forth between an unsuspecting victim and his approaching murderer. The episode shifts into cozy mode after that, but Duel maintains the tension and suspense of that opening for its entire running time.

What spurred Spielberg to such heights? Part of the answer must surely lie in the script by The Twilight Zone and TV-movie legend Richard Matheson, whose spare tale of a middle-class everyman thrust into battle with the rage-filled driver of a diesel truck liberated Spielberg from covering reams of dialogue and allowed him to focus on landscapes, faces, motion, and editing—in other words, cinema. It’s incredible how relentless Duel remains even in its extended version, and I love how Spielberg shoots the only unnecessary (and thematically obvious) added scene—the protagonist’s phone call with his wife—through the door of a washing machine, like Joseph H. Lewis filming through a wagon wheel. It’s a nice callback to the B-movie lineage of the 1970s TV movie, and a reminder that even Steven Spielberg was once, briefly, a termite artist.

Someone’s Watching Me! (John Carpenter, 1978)

Given the tight content restrictions of network television, as well as the increasingly dark, violent, and political tone of much of American horror and genre cinema of the 1970s, it’s a little surprising how many independent genre auteurs made work for the small screen in the 1970s. Wes Craven directed Summer of Fear (1978); Tobe Hooper took on Salem’s Lot; Ivan Nagy, director of the grimy NYC psycho-cop movie Deadly Hero (1975), made Mind Over Murder (1979); and John Carpenter made Someone’s Watching Me! and would later direct an Elvis biopic that brought him together with Kurt Russell for the first time.

Even if Someone’s Watching Me! lacks the relentlessly tight construction of Carpenter’s theatrical films, it’s one of his more thematically rich takes on contemporary American life, exploring voyeurism and gendered violence in ways that reference Hitchcock and suggest De Palma while assigning significant agency to its female protagonist. An NYC transplant who has moved into a Los Angeles high-rise, Leigh Michaels (Lauren Hutton) faces a campaign of harassment and stalking, including phone calls, unwanted gifts, and even electrical outages; finding the cops to be of no help, she takes matters into her own hands and pursues the creep herself. That Leigh’s stalker uses not just a telescope, but a whole arsenal of high-tech gadgets—microphones, tape recorders, and her apartment complex’s computerized maintenance system—gives the film a particularly modern feel, presenting a world of surveillance-based consumer comforts that can be easily weaponized against us.

In tracing the evolution of this subgenre, there is perhaps no film more important than Steven Spielberg’s Duel (1971). Made for television when the director was only twenty-four years old, the film dedicates most of its run time to the high-speed cat-and-mouse game between a psychotic gasoline truck driver and a commuter (Dennis Weaver) who has the audacity to pass him on a desert road. Duel is a tremendous feat of low-budget filmmaking, turning a filthy truck into one of horror’s great monsters (anticipating both Jaws and The Terminator as similarly single-minded killing machines) and creating a template for fight-for-your-life survival stories on the highway. What makes the film so effective is how unrelenting the truck driver is in his attempts to run Weaver off the road without any rational motive (all while remaining a faceless character), and Spielberg is similarly relentless in choreographing the action for sustained suspense in what is essentially a feature-length chase. Duel not only jumpstarted its  director’s career, it opened up the possibilities for vehicular terror on-screen and spawned many imitators over the next few decades.

These films present rural highways as inherently perilous spaces because they are so remote, and the protagonists—typically city folk—are initially oblivious to the dangers around them. “My mother told me never to do this,” says a young C. Thomas Howell in Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (1986), blissfully unaware that she was absolutely right: the man he just picked up is in fact a psychopath butchering people along the highway. Many of the roads on which these characters must defend themselves run through the American Southwest, an area notable for its long stretches of picturesque landscape, and one that connects these films to another mythic film tradition: the western. The earliest selections in Highway Horror appeared just after the sun set on the popularity of westerns, and the two modes of filmmaking share a number of similarities: characters who navigate violent and lawless lands, the conflict between urban and rural populations, an emphasis on action, and their status as dependable sources of work for stunt performers. It’s also worth noting that while some of the most well-known films in the highway-horror tradition are American productions, there are also many from all over the world, suggesting that the unique combination of terror and action thrills found in the subgenre translates to any country where car culture is dominant.

As the programmer of Highway Horror, I tried to fill the lineup with bonafide classics as well as underseen films worthy of attention. Consider this a road map to some of my personal favorites in the collection.

Race with the Devil (Jack Starrett, 1975)

In the 1970s, Peter Fonda and Warren Oates made three films together. This is the one in which they witness a sacrificial murder and are chased across Texas by Satanists in an RV. Race with the Devil is the platonic ideal of a drive-in picture from that decade. Fonda and Oates are eminently watchable, and it’s staggering how many different kinds of movies are contained in the eighty-eight-minute run time—road movie, horror movie, car-chase movie, buddy movie, motorcycle movie, paranoid thriller—and that director Jack Starrett, who previously made a number of low-budget biker movies, more or less succeeds at all of them. The stunt work is a particular highlight and involves Fonda and Oates defending themselves against gasoline-wielding marauders while multiple cars slam into their vehicle, as well as one particularly dangerous-looking sequence featuring live rattlesnakes.

Road Games (Richard Franklin, 1981)

The pitch is simple—Rear Window set in a truck driving across Australia—but the cheeky logline belies the assured filmmaking on display in one of my favorite thrillers of the ’80s. Stacy Keach plays a dingo-owning truck driver (or “truckie,” as the locals say) who suspects that the driver of a sleazy-looking green van is murdering women along the highway, and he recruits a hitchhiker (Jamie Lee Curtis) to help him stop the killer. Director Richard Franklin understands Hitchcockian plotting as well as any filmmaker of his generation (in fact, he would go on to direct the underrated Psycho II after this), but his novel twist on the material is to keep everything in motion. At the time of production, this film was the most expensive Australian film ever made, and its existence stands as a testament to how much the Australian Film Commission did to nurture the production of domestically made genre cinema. In that context, Road Games feels less like an anomaly and more like the cresting of an entire generation of Australian filmmakers, stuntpeople, and technicians working at the top of their game.

The Appointment (Lindsey C. Vickers, 1981)

Of all the films featured in Highway Horror, the one that I am most excited about showing is this early-’80s British chiller, which has long been virtually unavailable in the United States. Intended as the first of several prestige television films meant for international distribution (and shot on 35 mm and largely on location—rarities for British TV at the time), The Appointment (1982) opens with a shock of a prologue in which a young girl goes missing in the woods. It then shifts gears into a story of a businessman (played by Edward Woodward, star of The Wicker Man) who heads on a road trip for work despite his daughter being alarmingly distraught about him missing her music recital, as well as a series of portentous omens that signal that malevolent forces are at play and something horrible is about to happen. Sadly, the string of television films this movie was meant to inaugurate never materialized, and The Appointment became the sole feature film from director Lindsey C. Vickers, which is a shame because there’s nothing else quite like it. For decades, the film was difficult to see except on deteriorating VHS and Betamax copies, but in 2022 the British Film Institute discovered a one-inch broadcast tape master and released a Blu-ray. Since then, the film has picked up ardent fans, including Martin Scorsese, Isabelle Huppert, and Charli XCX.

Cohen and Tate (Eric Red, 1989)

After writing the screenplays for The Hitcher and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (another road-tripping western-horror hybrid), Eric Red made his directorial debut with this nasty thriller about a young boy in a witness protection program whose family is gunned down by two mobster hit men before they attempt to drag him back to their bosses in Texas. From the opening murders, Red establishes that this is a film in which anything can happen and the threat of violence hovers over every scene. Roy Scheider brings a subtle gravitas to the role of the aging hired-killer Cohen, while Adam Baldwin (just one year after appearing in Full Metal Jacket) plays his reckless and hotheaded young partner Tate. Red has cited The Searchers as a direct influence on Cohen and Tate, and the western elements are fully evident from the opening shot of an Oklahoma farmhouse. But the most memorable parts are the vehicle set pieces, which Red proves particularly adept at playing for maximum tension.

The Criterion Channel includes a treasure trove of horror movies ranging from the widely celebrated to the rare and unknown. To get you in the mood for Halloween, we asked six writers and filmmakers who love the genre to peek into the dark corners of the Channel and find underappreciated gems that have terrified, thrilled, and unsettled them. A mix of different eras and styles, the group of films they’ve chosen to champion include deeply strange, lesser-known works by two Japanese masters, a psychedelic horror western filled with old-school monster effects, and an unbearably tense tale of crime and trauma from actor-director Joel Edgerton.

Nathan Lee is an assistant professor of film at Hollins University and a widely published critic.

Samm Deighan is a film historian and programmer, the author of Hysterical Excess and Inhuman Ecstasy: The Cinema of Andrzej Zuławski, and editor of Revolution in 35 mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, among other books. She hosts the Eros + Massacre podcast.

Daniel Goldhaber is a filmmaker based between Berlin and Brooklyn. He has made three feature films: CAM, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and Faces of Death. He looks forward to making more feature films in the near future.

Payton McCarty-Simas is the coeditor of the Brooklyn Rail’s film section and the author of two books of film history, One Step Short of Crazy: “National Treasure” and the Landscape of American Conspiracy Culture, and That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism, and the American Witch Film. Their film criticism has also been featured in the Hollywood Reporter, Filmmaker Magazine, Bright Wall/Dark Room, and numerous other publications, and they have programmed film series at Anthology Film Archives in New York City.

Michael Almereyda’s newly published Writings and Relics: 1990–1995 is available from Sticking House Books. His film adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Zero K, featuring Caleb Landry Jones, Peter Sarsgaard, Britt Lower, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, is in postproduction. 

The Gift has a narrative simplicity and a refreshing sense of shifting sympathies for its characters. Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall—both incredibly likable actors—are Simon and Robyn, a well-off couple who run into a friend from Simon’s high-school days. Soon, old pal Gordo, played with stealth menace by Edgerton, invites them over for dinner. It’s not long before the social fissures start to show. Simon seems to only hazily remember Gordo, though it’s clear there’s a thorny past there for the latter. Things sour quickly, and eventually Simon and Robyn are stalked and terrorized by Gordo, whose obsession with them reveals a deep-seated desire to avenge Simon’s cruel adolescent crimes.

The Gift does a beautiful job of presenting a complex story of victimhood—first through Simon, who is both affable and perilously arrogant in equal measure, seeming to genuinely struggle to understand how he has invited Gordo’s wrath. Gordo—vulnerable, jagged, and authentically dangerous—is no less a victim, and the film probes how young men carelessly torture each other as a sickening rite of passage. As a queasy side note, The Gift also explores the many ways in which women end up as the collateral damage in these twisted psychological orbits. Much as women are used as objects and pawns in real-world arenas of male dominance, it’s Robyn—truly the innocent bystander in this escalating game between the two men—who suffers the most indignity.

At the time of the film’s release, I remember thinking that Jason’s performance was particularly revelatory—slippery and unpredictable—and I appreciated seeing an actor play someone who was so good at lying to himself. In presenting its unreliable dual protagonists, The Gift displays filmmaking confidence and tonal mystery: with its distorted reflections and undulating surfaces, the movie seems to suggest that the crimes of the past can never be buried, only obscured—and never for very long.

Karyn Kusama is a writer and director. Her films include Girlfight (2000), Jennifer’s Body (2009), The Invitation (2015), and Destroyer (2018).

A great proportion of the misery that wanders, in hideous forms, around the world, is allowed to rise from the negligence of parents.

And thus the heart will break,
Yet brokenly live on.

The first shiver of an auteur-instinct can be detected at age six, when Kubrick was told (presumably) to go to school. He refused. Is there any power more awesome in a child than the power of refusal—and any power less likely to be countenanced, particularly in a grandchild of striving Austrian Jewish immigrants in the Depression-era Bronx? Kubrick, in any case, was triumphantly, virtuosically truant. He missed exactly half of first grade, half of second, and more than half of third. The Bartleby act continued right through his formal education. He refused to study for a bar mitzvah, refused to attend more than a minimum of high school (he graduated with a low C-minus), and did not attend college—with the notable exception of auditing several classes at Columbia University, taught by Mark Van Doren, F. W. Dupee, and Lionel Trilling.

The two pastimes that did interest him, however, he undertook with a ferocity of focus that his peers found bizarre, if not frightening. Introduced to chess by his exasperated father, Kubrick took it up with all the energy he had withheld from his studies. After high school, he would support himself by playing for quarters in Washington Square Park. Later in life, he boasted, wistfully, that he could have been better than Bobby Fischer, if only he’d been allowed to study chess nine hours a day. Then again, who was stopping him?

But it was photography—in the form of an eight-pound Graflex the size of a shoebox, a gift from his father on his thirteenth birthday—that swallowed him up entirely. Finally, he had a good reason to skip school: marathon picture-taking excursions across New York City, the Graflex hidden in a brown paper bag, a hole torn for the lens to poke through. Even then, Kubrick’s approach was marked by strict command over form and narrative, applied through doleful, unblinking repetition. The day after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage, Kubrick had the idea to photograph a newsstand on Grand Concourse and 172nd Street. In the image, a disconsolate vendor sits slumped in the newsstand window, head in hand, framed by 120-point headlines. Kubrick brought the picture to the Manhattan office of Look, one of the nation’s most prominent photo magazines, and sold it for twenty-five dollars, launching his professional career. Kubrick claimed at the time that the photo had been a lucky shot, a scene he had just chanced upon, but that was a lie. As biographer John Baxter revealed decades later, Kubrick had admitted to a friend that he had “sweated blood” trying to convince the seasoned old news vendor to pose with sufficient despair.

Look was the ideal training ground for a photographer who hoped to graduate to motion pictures. The magazine specialized in narrative photojournalism, though when the two mandates came into opposition, the masthead cheerfully sacrificed journalistic etiquette for drama. Kubrick’s editor, Arthur Rothstein, permitted his photographers to go so far as to stage a reenactment, provided “the photographer honestly believes that his directions are creating a true picture of what actually happened.” It was a permissive policy, by any journalistic standard, but Kubrick would not be so constrained. Forget reenactment: he elected enactment.

An early success was “A Short-Short in a Movie Balcony,” a series of photographs that purported to show a young man making a move on a “total stranger” in a theater during a film screening, only to be rebuffed with a slap. In fact, the two principals were Kubrick’s high-school friends, the sole other audience member in the frame was his younger sister, Barbara, and the shoot was staged in a closed theater. In another series, “Life and Love on the New York City Subway,” a young couple embrace beside a body sprawled unconscious (dead?) on the Museum of Natural History station platform. The scene unfolds in a stark, noirish chiaroscuro—an effect created by the professional lighting equipment Kubrick had hauled down the subway steps. The couple were his first wife, Toba Metz, and his best friend, Alexander Singer. Whether the unconscious body was a third confederate is unknown, though one clue is provided by the fact that, in the test photographs taken for the series, the corpse pops up in different locations.

It was a Look assignment, a day in the life of the boxer Walter Cartier, that Kubrick developed into his first film. Despite the documentary billing (“All Events Depicted in This Film Are True”), Kubrick staged Day of the Fight (1951) as deliberately as he did his photographs. The day was shot over several weeks, and nothing was left to chance. A typical directive: “I want you to get out this side of the bed, walk, stretch, and yawn.” To elicit the viewer’s sympathy, Kubrick eliminated Walter Cartier’s girlfriend from the narrative and replaced her with a little cocker spaniel, whom Cartier feeds from his plate. The fight itself was restaged (the tell: in the close-ups, Cartier doesn’t wear a mouth guard), and supplementary crowd shots were taken in Kubrick’s living room, with Singer and his wife posing as bloodthirsty fans.

The real star of the bout was obvious, even to the film’s hero. “Stanley comes in prepared like a fighter for a big fight,” Cartier later said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing, where he’s going, and what he wants to accomplish.” Though others are listed in the credits—including Singer, with an assistant-director credit—Kubrick claimed to have done everything himself, “from keeping an accounting book to dubbing in the punches on the soundtrack.” Sharing the screen with the film’s title is the credit, “A Stanley Kubrick Production.” He was twenty-two years old.

There is one significant way, however, in which Kubrick’s debut breaks from the films that would follow: Walter Cartier wins his fight.

Kubrick would win most of his bouts too. According to his own unsparing appraisal, he finished with a career record of 8–3, with one split decision (and one no contest). His first two features, Fear and Desire (1952) and Killer’s Kiss (1955), he considered apprentice works. He disowned Spartacus (1960), his first large-budget production, on which, at star Kirk Douglas’s request, he replaced director Anthony Mann two weeks into filming. It was the only time in Kubrick’s career that he was not granted final cut. “I tried with only limited success to make the film as real as possible,” he complained nearly three decades later, “but I was up against a pretty dumb script.” He judged Lolita (1962) flawed (grumbling that he failed to “sufficiently dramatize the erotic aspect of Humbert’s relationship with Lolita”), and he died four months before the opening of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which he may not have finished editing. But the rest were knockouts.

Over the decades, Kubrick’s sensibilities evolved, as he went where his reading took him. He claimed that he had never read a book for pleasure until he turned nineteen, but he made up for it for the rest of his life. He was a consummate autodidact—another vehicle for his bootstrapped self-creation—and interlarded his promotional interviews with knowing references to arcane academic studies, Continental philosophers, and Central European novelists. He confounded expectations with each new film, exchanging the lavishly populated toga rebellions of Spartacus for the claustrophobic college-town angst of Lolita, the brutalist dystopia of A Clockwork Orange (1971) for the baroque eighteenth-century romanticism of Barry Lyndon (1975). He rarely worked with the same leading actor twice, the only exceptions coming early in his career for Sterling Hayden, Kirk Douglas (by contractual necessity), and a multiplicity of Peter Sellerses in Lolita and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). “He was a chameleon,” said Steven Spielberg. “He never made the same picture twice.” But a chameleon only sheds its skin—not its nervous system.

How, then, to chart Kubrick’s nervous system? How to define Kubrickian? If you blur your eyes to the varied settings and genres and periods, a central conceit emerges. The critic James Naremore describes it as “the story of how a carefully constructed plan fails.” Biographer David Mikics: “His movies are about mastery that fails. Perfectly controlled schemes get botched through human error or freak accidents.” Writer Geoffrey O’Brien characterizes it as “the obsessiveness of the human attempt to control the future—one’s own or the world’s—and the complicated ways in which that attempt fails.” The films begin with vanity and end in failure, failure, failure.

The Kubricks, and everyone they knew, would have had a more concise way of putting it: “Mann tracht, un Gott lacht.” Man plans, and God laughs. This is the DNA of Kubrick’s storytelling. Like any other genetic trait, once you know to look for it, you can’t unsee it.

Kubrick liked to say that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents. He also happened to have a Jewish sibling and Jewish cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and friends and wives. His Galician great-grandfather, Hersh Kubrik, arrived on the Lusitania in 1899. Kubrick’s father, Jacob, in the well-worn tradition of assimilationist German-speaking Jews, changed his name to Jacques (and later to Jack). Jack graduated from NYU, studied obstetrics at the New York Homeopathic Medical College and Flower Hospital, and moved from the Lower East Side to the Bronx, where he began his own practice, specializing in otolaryngology. Stanley grew up comfortably middle-class, which to many of his friends resembled opulence. “He lived in a house,” Alexander Singer told Baxter. “I didn’t know anybody who lived in a house.”

Though Kubrick received no religious education and was disdainful of all monotheistic religions, an emergent branch of Kubrick studies has devoted itself to reclaiming his Jewishness. The biographical evidence for the claim lies in his devotion to the literature of Mitteleuropean Jewry (Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, and Arthur Schnitzler, whose Traumnovelle Kubrick adapted into Eyes Wide Shut), his association with Greenwich Village’s Jewish intellectual scene (Diane Arbus invited him to Saturday-night charades), and his lifelong preoccupation with Nazi Germany, which bloomed when he met his third wife, Christiane Harlan.

Kubrick spotted Harlan on German television and, after they began dating, cast her in the stunning, ennobling final scene of Paths of Glory (1957)—a last-minute addition to the film. She sings “The Faithful Hussar” to the cynical and weary French troops, offering a redemption that has been withheld on the battlefield. Harlan, to whom Kubrick remained married for the rest of his life, was the daughter of entertainers who performed for Nazi troops at the front. Her uncle was Veit Harlan, the director of the Joseph Goebbels–sponsored film Jud Süss (1940), after Triumph of the Will the most notorious, and effective, work of Nazi propaganda. (Before meeting Veit Harlan and Christiane’s other Nazi relatives, in 1957, Kubrick fortified himself by chugging a glass of vodka. “I’m standing here like Woody Allen,” he later told Christiane, “looking like ten Jews.”) Kubrick spent most of his career trying to make a film about European Jewry during World War II, obsessively reading Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, William L. Shirer. “Given that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust and researched it for years,” said his daughter Katharina Kubrick, “I leave it to you to decide how he felt about his religion.” At his funeral, mourners recited the kaddish.

Yet it is in the narrative design of his films that you can see most clearly the shadows of Job, and Absalom, and Nebuchadnezzar. Ambitious schemes unerringly collapse, often with the abruptness of a punch line. Hubris is mocked; ambition is undermined by incompetence; humiliation is inevitable, and usually delivered with comic bathos.

The climactic sequence of Killer’s Kiss is structured around a carefully timed meeting organized by Davey (Jamie Smith), a boxer about to abandon his career—essentially Walter Cartier, had he lost his bout. Davey tries to rescue his downtrodden neighbor Gloria (Irene Kane), a taxi dancer in Times Square, from her loutish boss by arranging to pick her up outside her club at the exact moment his manager drops off his payment. The plan seems poised to succeed until two teenagers steal Davey’s scarf. When he chases after them, he blows the timing of the various handoffs, inviting a whirlwind of violence, chaos, and a misery that withstands the embrace between Gloria and Davey that concludes the film.

The Killing tracks the slow-motion unraveling of a heist that succeeds marvelously in its conception, only to fail, in every possible way, in its execution—a film noir that unfolds with the narrative logic of a screwball comedy. In Paths of Glory, a suicidal attack mission, undertaken for no strategic reason other than to help a succession of French generals each curry favor with his superior, backfires predictably and catastrophically. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), the only one in the line of command to protest the order, manages to retain his humanity, but nothing else. Dax learns that even a selfless act of heroism cannot obstruct the cruelty of a system founded upon a single motivation: to increase its own power.

The same synopsis could be applied, with slight adjustments of tone and emphasis, to Kubrick’s other war pictures, Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Lolita is the story of a domestic, if equally shortsighted, scheme: H. Humbert’s seduction of a child, enabled by chance (a car accident) and undone by self-deception and clumsiness. Barry Lyndon pursues a succession of half-baked plans that yield fleeting triumphs, only to cost the hero his honor, his fortune, his son, his left leg . . .

As Kubrick’s canvas broadened, and his budgets expanded, the “carefully constructed plan” became, more often than not, the product of institutional groupthink: a military desperate to train brainless killers, a government pursuing the principle of mutually assured destruction to its logical end, a conformist dystopian society, a secret cabal of lecherous plutocrats. Kubrick was always careful to personify the cruelty of institutions in a character, the better to expose the inhumanity of rationalism gone amok. Eyes Wide Shut’s Victor Ziegler, A Clockwork Orange’s minister of the interior, and even HAL 9000 announce their schemes with a disarming charm that under pressure is revealed to be a charade, hiding power-hungry depravity.

“The most terrifying fact about the universe,” Kubrick told Playboy in 1968, “is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.” This is also the most terrifying quality of Kubrick’s glare. The slow, receding zoom, used in the opening shot of A Clockwork Orange and as a central motif in Barry Lyndon, reduces Kubrick’s heroes from giants to ants. His tracking shots pin his characters in the center of the screen as the world, indifferent to their crises, transforms around them. The implacable rigor, symmetry, and stateliness of Kubrick’s framing devices—particularly his use of the magisterial one-point perspective, which draws the eye toward a single vanishing point in the center of the screen—lead the viewer to assume an interpretative stance. Instead of encouraging an intimate identification with his heroes, Kubrick’s formalism travels in the opposite direction. We are not face to face, eye to eye, but standing in the museum gallery, examining the canvas, asking questions of composition, context, perspective. On the rare occasions when Kubrick does move in tight, it tends to be during outbursts of violence, or to suggest a character has gone insane (which explains the preponderance of the technique in 1980’s The Shining).

Barry Lyndon’s epilogue would suit most of his films: “Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now.”

Yet Kubrick never submitted himself to this equalizing view. On the contrary: with each passing film, his method grew increasingly pharaonic. Only Kubrick would be exempted from the laws of hubris—and the laws of gravity. For 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), rather than use camera tricks to simulate weightlessness, Kubrick commissioned Vickers-Armstrongs Limited to construct a working centrifuge at the full scale of the spaceship Discovery, for the equivalent of about eight million dollars in 2026. Weighing thirty tons and resembling a Ferris wheel, it rotated at three miles an hour, allowing the actors to appear to walk up the walls, across the ceiling, and down the other side. The centrifuge forced the production into an extraordinary series of contingent measures: every piece of the set needed to be bolted down; crew members wore steel helmets to protect against flying debris; and so many cables, lights, speakers, computers, and climate-control systems had to be installed that Kubrick insisted a fire-department rescue team remain on call. “Had there been a fire,” said one studio executive, “it could have been a flash fire like the one in Apollo 1 that killed the three astronauts.” A camera traveling the walls of the set did once tear loose from its track, falling thirty feet to the floor; but since this was life, and not a Kubrick film, nobody was hurt.

The tales of Kubrick’s exactitude—his “rage for order,” in Mikics’s phrase—are the subject of an entire lineage of documentary films (see, for instance, Jon Ronson’s Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, from 2008), but any list would have to begin with Candlegate. Insisting that Barry Lyndon be lit exclusively by period-consistent light sources, Kubrick embarked on a global search to find a lens capable of capturing night scenes by candlelight, settling upon one developed by NASA to photograph the dark side of the moon; to preserve continuity, dozens of new candles had to be burned to precise lengths for each take (causing the actors to complain of breathing problems). The Guinness Book of World Records credits Kubrick with the highest number of retakes of a single scene with dialogue, by filming Scatman Crothers telling Danny Lloyd how to shine 148 times; in the shot used for the film, the six-year-old’s expression is convincingly catatonic. (Director Lee Unkrich, after studying the shot logs at the Stanley Kubrick Archive in London, has recently contested this claim, insisting that the longest Kubrick spent on any scene in The Shining was on the early dolly shot following Jack and Wendy on their tour of the Gold Ballroom, completed in a mere sixty-six takes—a distinction without much difference.) With Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick set the record for the longest uninterrupted film shoot in history, at eighteen months—followed by nine months of editing (which concluded with a heart attack). Once a film was completed, he supervised the editing; the marketing; the graphic design of the posters; the press tour; the projection systems of the individual cinemas in which the films would screen; the foreign translations of not only his film titles but every line of dialogue dubbed into French, Italian, Spanish, and German; and the selection of voice actors . . .

And now that civilization dangles over the maw of machine learning, Kubrick has reclaimed his status as one of the leading techno-ethicists of our age:

There’s no doubt that we’re entering a mechanarchy . . . Eventually, we will have to share this planet with machines whose intelligence and abilities far surpass our own . . . Looking into the distant future, I suppose it’s not inconceivable that a semisentient robot-computer subculture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer needed man.

That was Kubrick in 1968, promoting the first great work of art about artificial intelligence, and still widely considered the best. Not far behind is A.I. (2001), a film Kubrick tried to make for decades, before ceding it to Steven Spielberg (Kubrick had optioned the short story on which it is based, Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” in the early seventies). Both films examine, with harrowing precision, many of the still-unsolved ethical conundrums posed by machine intelligence. The central drama of 2001 concerns the alignment problem, today commonly known as the “HAL 9000 problem”: What happens when superintelligent machines conclude, as seems inevitable, that humanity stands in the way of their goals? A.I., which begins with a minute-long voice-over detailing the inevitable consequences of unchecked climate change and ends in a drowned New York City, asks what happens when we can no longer distinguish between imitation and reality, or when we no longer want to. Behind that question stands a series of additional ones, each nested within the last like the hedges of the maze at the Overlook Hotel. Can one fall in love with a machine? Can a machine feel? Can a machine love? Can humanity survive technological progress beyond a certain threshold? If we merge with silicon, will we still be human? Now that we have begun to merge with silicon—now that we have, to a greater or lesser degree, outsourced our memories, our characters, our intellects to the cloud—have we already lost our humanity? What more is there to lose? What to gain?

An even more uneasy resonance can be found in the sudden preponderance of Daedalus figures in American public life. Call it the “Jack D. Ripper problem,” or the “Paul Mireau effect”—or the “Napoleon complex,” to borrow the subject of another of Kubrick’s unrealized projects: imperious men in positions of influence who believe themselves responsible for ushering in a new world order. The political scene perennially disgorges such figures, but now that the power locus has shifted west, the Jack D. Rippers and Dr. Strangeloves have proliferated in Silicon Valley, where 2001 has acquired the status of a sacred text—the tech industry’s chosen monolith. Elon Musk credits 2001 as the source of his core convictions about AI. In 2024, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin sent miniature black slabs modeled after the 2001 monolith into outer space. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has chided the public not to associate AI with “the haunting voice of HAL,” as if the neutral, gentlemanly tenor of actor Douglas Rain were to blame for fears that humanity will cede authority to androids.

There is a temptation, when writing about artists who have left the stage, to ask what they might have made of this or that contemporary phenomenon. With Kubrick, the temptation is misplaced. What would he have made of our current predicaments? We already have the answer. You can find it in Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A.I., but also in The Killing, where a meticulously designed scheme fails under the weight of incompetence and envy. Or in A Clockwork Orange, a satire about a society in which constant barrages of images of sex and violence become, as Kubrick himself put it, “dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots.” You can find it in Paths of Glory, where Kubrick never shows us the opposing army—because the real enemy wears the embroidered stars of the French high command. You can even find it in Eyes Wide Shut, in which extremities of wealth and power lead, ineluctably, to barbarism. Kubrick’s films are timeless because he asked, with as much psychological clarity as any filmmaker ever has, timeless questions—the kinds of questions that will be with us, no matter what technological powers we inherit, at least until the city of his childhood sinks to the bottom of the sea.

The cultural impact of The Silence of the Lambs as a whole was immediate. The film’s sweep of the 1992 Oscars was unprecedented for a horror movie. But several hundred people organized by the group Queer Nation protested the awards ceremony in Los Angeles, and their primary target was The Silence of the Lambs. The early 1990s were a desolate period for queer representation in Hollywood. Mainstream pictures actively ignored the AIDS epidemic and the homophobia that was very much present in society, from hate crimes to employment discrimination. Queer erasure and negligence predominated on-screen. In 1991 alone, critically acclaimed films had “straight-washed” an adapted queer story (Fried Green Tomatoes), suggested that John F. Kennedy’s assassination had involved a cabal of gay conspirators (Oliver Stone’s JFK), and featured a character who is traumatized after being raped by a homosexual man as a child (The Prince of Tides). Buffalo Bill was the last straw. After the Academy Awards, Demme expressed empathy for the protesters. “There is great cause for anger from the gay population of this country,” he said. “It’s the responsibility of filmmakers to have a much broader range of characters.” He followed up The Silence of the Lambs with the well-intentioned, Oscar-winning AIDS-discrimination legal drama Philadelphia (1993).

Although there’s no strong consensus within the trans community as to whether the character is actually trans, or worth the trouble of reclaiming, the public perception of Jame when the film came out was of a trans character, and the harmful ramifications that perception has had for trans women are an inescapable element of the film’s legacy. For their part, when adapting Thomas Harris’s novel, Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally distanced themselves from the idea of the character as trans, giving Hannibal Lecter the line (based on a similar one in the novel) “Billy’s not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is. He tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.” Whether it was Harris’s intention to portray Jame as a disturbed fetishist or somebody more complicated to pin down is also unclear. Nonetheless, there is complexity to what is objectively a deeply negative film image. In the depths of Jame’s depraved actions, which were inspired by those of real-life serial killers, it’s possible to discover some authentic reflections of a trans person put into a state of total crisis.

In Harris’s novel, Jame is on black-market estrogen for minor feminization and has a mournful attachment to their late beauty-queen mother, whose pageants they intently watch on VHS. These elements are not present in the film, though Jame sewing together a “woman suit” from the skin of their victims remains unaltered, a salacious hook for viewers. Jame’s kills are revealed as a trail of necrotic clues: a decomposing head in a storage facility, an autopsy of a young girl with diamond-shaped sewing-pattern pieces carved into her back. The audience can form a disturbing image of Jame in their heads before the character appears. Perhaps it was the very suggestion by Lecter that the character thought they were trans that permitted viewers to consider Jame in a lineage with other on-screen transfeminine serial killers: Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), Bobbi in Dressed to Kill (1980), and Angela in Sleepaway Camp (1983).

In the movie version, when we first encounter Jame, they are using Ted Bundy’s modus operandi of apprehending a female victim by posing as an injured man in need of help. Catherine Martin (Brooke Smith) explodes onto the screen, singing her heart out in her car to “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, in one of the adept uses of character behavior and popular music to create identification that Demme is known for. Catherine stops to help when she sees that Jame is struggling to lift a couch into the back of their van. Because of the empathy with which she was introduced, it is particularly jolting when Jame abducts her. But the director also extends a strange and complex empathy to Jame. Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto opt for a point-of-view shot when Jame cuts Catherine’s blouse open from the back, symbolically suggesting the “carving” that will eventually be done. Jame stares in admiration, gently grazing their palm over her skin, and rattles out, “Good . . . good.” The implication of potential trans femininity renders the scene even more chilling, because viewers can grasp both the wrongness of the actions and the skewed logic of the motivations that underlie them. The irony of both the novel’s and the film’s waffling over the transness of the character is that these layers of Jame are most readily available if the character is in fact trans, and has suffered under the scrutiny and gatekeeping of the medical establishment. Otherwise, Jame is just a monster.

In book and movie, we learn that Jame once sought treatment at the Johns Hopkins University Gender Identity Clinic, and an understanding of that institution’s significance to trans medicine in the United States adds complexity to the question of the character. Opening in 1965, the JHU Gender Identity Clinic was one of the earliest of its kind in the United States. Americans could, if approved, have trans procedures at a globally recognized institution in their own country, instead of going abroad, as the actress and singer Christine Jorgensen had famously done a generation earlier. Tally’s script portrays the Gender Identity Clinic as a bastion of compassionate do-gooders, with its avatar, Dr. Danielson, referring to his patients as “nonviolent people with a real problem.” He is put off by Agent Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn) and his dogged pursuit of Jame’s file. However, Danielson, who in the book is a calculating bureaucrat, ultimately acquiesces after the FBI threatens to shut down the clinic because of the Jame connection.

In reality, a wave of anti-trans backlash had led JHU to abruptly halt trans surgeries in 1979. As closures of many gender identity clinics occurred across North America in the early eighties, trans medicine, already siloed and specialized, became rife with restrictive medical gatekeeping; what was supposed to be a standardized model for medical transition became deeply arbitrary. Indeed, Jame is denied by JHU in The Silence of the Lambs for not being a “true transsexual,” but many real-life trans people were also denied treatment there. Some of those trans people went through other channels, such as going abroad for surgery, and trans activist groups and educational organizations were formed to combat medical gatekeeping and malfeasance. However, not all trans people who were denied treatment had feasible alternatives; for them, given the risks to their mental health and physical safety, being denied surgery was potentially a death sentence.

Though its presence is greatly diminished from page to screen, the JHU Gender Identity Clinic is more than a throwaway reference in Tally’s adaptation. The script removed details about Jame taking hormones and scaled down conversations between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter about Jame’s pathology—and scripted scenes were further omitted or shortened for the theatrical cut of the film—but the institution providing the key to locating Jame and rescuing Catherine proved too significant for Tally and Demme to alter. In that respect, transness is inextricably linked to the narrative of Jame and The Silence of the Lambs—whether we like it or not.

The strange allure of Jame as a trans figure is rooted not only in the shadow history of JHU that inhabits the film but also in the voyeuristic fascination with their notorious “tuck” scene, set to “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus. The dark romanticism of the song and Q’s androgynous voice give life to Jame’s expression of becoming. Their mincing, red Dr. Frank-N-Furter lips and teal satin wings show the effort of their attempt to embody femininity, but the audience has already seen the half-finished skin suit in Jame’s lair. The violence distorts the palpable ache of their euphoria and dysphoria. The scene climaxes with Jame tucking their genitals and posing like Icarus in front of their camcorder. Through the cisgender gaze—of the creative people behind the book and film and of the moviegoing public of 1991—Jame’s tucking became a sleazy, perverted peep show, and it sewed together their actions with outré gender expression in a way that both Demme and Ted Levine, the actor who plays Jame, would express regret for in the decades to come.

Jame is conceived to be somewhat unknowable, and it may be that we see the true face of their emotional state just one time, when they bark at the captive Catherine, “You don’t know what pain is!” Levine’s line reading is convincing and underscores that we are observing a deeply wounded and lost human who has struggled and never found help. It doesn’t make The Silence of the Lambs any less of a film to acknowledge that it could function as a story about a trans woman pushed to their breaking point. What it does is open the work up to further consideration of the question of why stories of transness by cisgender artists in the twentieth century were so often told in this way.

A portion of this essay has been adapted by the authors from a chapter of their coauthored book, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema.

Although we never catch a glimpse of the Berlin Wall in Christiane F., the film reflects West Berlin’s exceptional status as a city on the front lines of the Cold War. Known for the insular ambience forged from its geographical location as a western outpost in the Eastern Bloc, the city derived its postwar allure as much from its association with Weimar-era culture as from the material conditions, including rent stabilization and wage subsidies, that enabled the experiments in art and living—both luminous and disconsolate—taking place there.

The claustrophobia of West Berlin, and the attendant urge of its denizens to escape into excess, figure prominently from the first frames of Christiane F. A slow pan to a close-up introduces the film’s eponymous protagonist, who recounts in voice-over the squalid conditions of the high-rise apartment buildings in the Gropiusstadt, the housing estate where she has lived since she was six. Bearing the name of its architect, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, the satellite city was developed from 1962 to 1975 in order to create affordable housing in the district of Neukölln, along the perimeter of the wall, an area whose open vistas would allow for light-filled and airy modern residences.

But as Christiane describes it in the very first sentence of her voice-over, by the time the complex was completed it had already become a flash point for the social neglect that is on full view in Edel’s film: “Nothing but piss and crap everywhere. You just have to look closely.” A shot of the project’s narrow, low-ceilinged corridors allows us to do just that: before Christiane appears, we see an anonymous kid skateboarding into view, bathed in the film’s signature cold blue fluorescent light, which reveals the building’s dank, fetid floors and peeling paint. When Christiane exits the high-rise, her gaze lands on a poster for Sound, “Europe’s most modern disco,” whose logo of lusciously painted lips rhymes with her own rose-colored mouth in the film’s opening close-up of her face, underscoring the disco’s lure for Christiane, whose voice-over concludes with the words: “I want to go there.”

Christiane F. then takes viewers on a ride from the periphery of West Berlin to its center, following Christiane to Sound, the entry point for her descent into the underground world of drugs and sex work. This ride is figured through successive tracking shots recorded by cameras mounted on the side and front of a subway car moving along elevated tracks against the backdrop of the night city, recalling similar panoramic shots in Walter Ruttmann’s landmark film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), which begins with the arrival of a train in the metropolis. These shots suggest a form of virtual tourism, offering viewers proximity to the desolate thrills of the city in which Christiane is soon immersed.

Born in Hamburg in 1962, the real-life Felscherinow moved with her parents to West Berlin as a child. Growing up in the Gropiusstadt, she began smoking hash at the age of twelve, and by thirteen she was using heroin, supporting her addiction through sex work. In 1978, Felscherinow told her story to the journalists Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck, who published it first as a serialized feature in the magazine Stern and later in book form as Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Zoo Station, 1979). Framed as a memoir told in Felscherinow’s own words, with additional sections written by her mother and a youth pastor, Hermann and Rieck’s narrative became the top-selling nonfiction book in the history of West Germany. Estimates suggest that more than twenty million West Germans—nearly a third of the population—read Felscherinow’s story in either magazine or book form, and it was subsequently translated into numerous languages.

The book’s resonance derives from its authentic account of the increasingly dismal drug scene in West Berlin, which saw more overdoses than any other European city in the late 1970s. A by-product of youth unemployment and Cold War ennui, addiction also drove the child prostitution and petty crime that ran rampant on the so-called Babystrich around Zoo Station. Although Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo was billed as a cautionary tale, its cult status was certainly fueled by both trauma voyeurism and, on the part of young readers, a fervent attraction to its antihero protagonist. The newspaper Die Zeit referred to the book as “the bible of the tennis-shoe generation”—a German term for Generation X—even comparing it to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s classic novel of youth rebellion, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

For Bernd Eichinger, the young producer who acquired the rights to Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo and played a key role in its creative development as a feature film, the book’s sensational treatment of controversial social problems and its remarkable popularity made Felscherinow’s story ripe for adaptation. With Christiane F., which became the top-grossing film of 1981 in West Germany, Eichinger patented a strategy of producing adaptations of major best sellers that would make him the most successful German producer of the contemporary period, ushering in a shift away from the auteur-driven aesthetic experiments of the New German Cinema and toward commercially oriented genre films.

Eichinger initially hired the filmmaker Roland Klick to write and direct Christiane F. on the merits of Supermarket (1974), a crime thriller about young people on the streets of Hamburg. Shortly before shooting began, however, Eichinger decided that Klick’s vision for the film was incompatible with his own and parted ways with him, necessitating a new screenplay and a new director. Eichinger turned to two of his friends from the University of Television and Film Munich, the screenwriter Herman Weigel and the director Uli Edel, both of whom shared his passion for mainstream American film. Edel had discovered cinema during his teenage years at a strict Jesuit boarding school and, after graduating from film school in 1974, began working in television. Christiane F. was Edel’s first feature film for the cinema, and its success laid the groundwork for his subsequent career as one of Germany’s most assured film and television directors, known for his distinguished oeuvre of transnational and multilingual productions. As a frequent collaborator with Eichinger, Edel directed a series of successful screen adaptations, including Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).

For Christiane F., Edel and Eichinger achieved an immersive sense of authenticity by casting nonprofessional teenage actors, including thirteen-year-old Natja Brunckhorst in the leading role; by shooting on location amid actual drug use and sex work; and by using handheld cameras and other techniques reminiscent of documentary film. At the same time, they amplified the generic dimensions of the story to create multiple points of access for viewers, enhancing the movie’s widespread appeal with conventions of the after-school special, the social-problem film, the love story, the musical, and the horror film.

From the moment she takes off her tennis shoes and straps on high heels over her tube socks outside the disco, Christiane embarks on a journey that swiftly leads from an LSD trip to a heroin habit, and from a crush on the dreamy Detlef (Thomas Haustein) to joining Detlef’s hustle selling sex to men. This journey is set in motion by the music of Felscherinow’s idol David Bowie, whose songs figure prominently in Edel’s film. When she first enters Sound, Christiane’s friend Kessi (Daniela Jaeger) pulls her into the venue’s cinema, where Christiane is offered pills and groped by a boy. This initiation takes place during a projection of George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie film Night of the Living Dead, an apt segue into Christiane F.’s presentation of addiction through the genre logic of horror, via dark settings, chiaroscuro lighting, ominous music, jump scares, erupting bodily fluids, and abject bodies, including half-dead junkies and corpses that appear unexpectedly. References to horror films abound, including to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), which shapes the visual language of the sequence in which Christiane and Detlef withdraw from heroin, and to F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which plays in the disco cinema, linking Christiane F. to the Weimar classics that Bob Fosse’s blockbuster Cabaret (1972) had revived in the public imagination.

This November, discover the link between pop style and turn-of-the-century cinema’s exuberant visual innovation with From MTV to Hollywood, a collection gathering work from directors who honed their imaginations making music videos before unleashing their talents on the big screen. A Nicolas Cage retrospective looks back at the electric, bewildering career of one of our most unconventional actors, while a spotlight on Gene Tierney gathers the films that cemented her elusive and hypnotic screen presence. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including Roy Andersson’s Existential Comedies, the newly restored New York indie No Picnic, a tribute to legendary producer Jeremy Thomas, and an all-time comedy classic that goes to eleven.

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.

From MTV to Hollywood

In the era when MTV reached full cultural domination, music videos served as petri dishes for experimentation, allowing up-and-coming auteurs to hone their boundary-pushing styles before unleashing them on the big screen. Directors who cut their teeth finding a cinematic language for hip-hop, indie, and pop acts went on to envision some of the freshest, most thrilling and even avant-garde movies released around the turn of the century. Kinetic, audacious, and hyperstylized, these Y2K-era touchstones from filmmakers like David Fincher (Se7en), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Hype Williams (Belly) rewired the possibilities of visual storytelling.

Programmed by Sean Fennessey

FEATURING: Guncrazy (1992), CB4 (1993),* Se7en (1995), Belly (1998), The Replacement Killers (1998), Being John Malkovich (1999),* The Cell (2000), Sexy Beast (2000), CQ (2001), Human Nature (2001), Adaptation. (2002), One Hour Photo (2002), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004),* Thumbsucker (2005),* ATL (2006), The Runaways (2010)

Starring Nicolas Cage

Pioneer of a style of acting he calls “nouveau shamanic,” Nicolas Cage stretches the boundaries of screen performance to their limits, pursuing a heightened, kabuki-like expressionism that is instinctive, abstract, and thrillingly unpredictable. That he has deployed this approach across offbeat independent projects and major Hollywood blockbusters alike makes him a truly one-of-a-kind star: the leading man as wild man, a force so galvanic that, even when working with major directors like Spike Jonze (Adaptation.), David Lynch (Wild at Heart), Werner Herzog (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), and Martin Scorsese (Bringing Out the Dead), he often emerges as the film’s co-auteur, reshaping its texture through his live-wire physicality and risk-taking choices few other actors would dare attempt.

FEATURING: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982),* Rumble Fish (1983),* Valley Girl (1983), Birdy (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Moonstruck (1987), Raising Arizona (1987), Vampire’s Kiss (1988), Wild at Heart (1990),* Leaving Las Vegas (1995), City of Angels (1998), Snake Eyes (1998),* Bringing Out the Dead (1999),* Adaptation. (2002), Matchstick Men (2003), The Wicker Man (2006), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Starring Gene Tierney

Featuring an introduction by critic Imogen Sara Smith, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

With her porcelain beauty and a cool sophistication that seemed to conceal turbulent emotional depths, Gene Tierney emerged as one of the most arresting stars of Hollywood’s golden age. Though equally striking in the sparky con-woman comedy Rings on Her Fingers, the brooding gothic melodrama Dragonwyck, and the gorgeously atmospheric romantic fantasy The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, it was in the realm of noir that she perhaps made her greatest impact, bringing a fascinating, enigmatic ambiguity to classics like Laura, Night and the City, and, above all, Leave Her to Heaven, in which her elegant poise masks a shocking monstrousness.

FEATURING: Rings on Her Fingers (1942), Laura (1944), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Dragonwyck (1946), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), That Wonderful Urge (1948), Night and the City (1950), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), Way of a Gaucho (1952), Never Let Me Go (1953)

Celebrating Jeremy Thomas

As founder of the British film production outfit Recorded Picture Company, Jeremy Thomas, who passed away this September, set in motion some of the most sensational, provocative, and culturally impactful art-house hits of the last fifty years, enabling creatively restless directors to realize their visions. From challenging audiences with his very first production, Jerzy Skolimowski’s terrifying enigma The Shout, to courting controversy with Nicolas Roeg’s daring study of erotic obsession Bad Timing to achieving Oscar glory with Bernardo Bertolucci’s sumptuous epic The Last Emperor, Thomas left a titanic imprint on film culture by giving uncompromising, personal cinema a space to flourish.

FEATURING: The Shout (1978), Bad Timing (1980), Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), The Hit (1984), Insignificance (1985), The Last Emperor (1987), The Cup (1999), Sexy Beast (2000), Palermo Shooting (2008), The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021), EO (2022), Anselm (2023), Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (2023)

Hiro Murai’s Adventures in Moviegoing

One of the major forces behind some of the most talked-about pop-culture sensations of the last decade—from the zeitgeist-capturing music video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” to the acclaimed series Atlanta, The Bear, and Widow’s Bay—multi-Emmy-winning director and producer Hiro Murai is a creative powerhouse with a deep, lifelong love of cinema. In this episode of Adventures in Moviegoing, he joins Chris Ryan (editorial director of The Ringer and cohost of The Watch podcast) for an entertaining and insightful conversation about the creative overlap between his life, his work, and the films he has watched and loved, from early memories of movie-watching in Japan with his cinephile father to the transformative influence of cinematic visionaries like Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, and Wim Wenders.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

No Picnic

A wonderfully scruffy, deadpan time capsule from the bohemian fringes of the 1980s East Village, this freewheeling urban picaresque follows Mac (David Brisbin), a hangdog jukebox repairman, as he searches the city’s margins for a mysterious woman—an odyssey that captures the eccentric flavor of downtown Manhattan when it was still the epicenter of cool, as well as the stirrings of gentrification that would soon transform the neighborhood. Shot in gloriously grainy, noir-tinged black-and-white images (which won experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton a Sundance award for Best Cinematography) and featuring classic New York personalities like Richard Hell, Steve Buscemi, and Luis Guzmán, No Picnic serves as a gloriously grimy elegy for a bygone era.

Utu Redux

A landmark of New Zealand cinema composed in images of shocking, feverish power, this blistering Kiwi western is an audacious vision of anticolonial rage that’s been championed by the likes of Pauline Kael and Quentin Tarantino. In 1870s New Zealand, Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace), a Māori warrior working as a scout for the colonial troops, finds his tribe massacred by the very army he is helping. Anguished and betrayed, be vows to exact retribution—“utu”—on those occupying his people’s land. Originally released in 1983 and distributed internationally in a compromised recut, the film is now presented in its definitive director’s cut, Utu Redux.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

The mock rock doc that goes to eleven follows a trio of British heavy-metal headbangers as they embark on a hilariously disastrous American tour.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Three audio commentaries by cast and crew members, a conversation between director Rob Reiner and actor Patton Oswalt, ninety-eight minutes of outtakes, and more.

The Band, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and other legendary artists put on a concert for the ages in Martin Scorsese’s ecstatic elegy for the classic-rock era.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Two audio commentaries by Scorsese, his crew, and performers; an interview with Scorsese; a documentary on the making of the film; and more.

A jolt of pure adrenaline shot straight to the heart of 1990s British indie cinema, Danny Boyle’s edgy, darkly funny portrait of addiction chooses life in all its ugly, beautiful, terrifying, strange exhilaration.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, screenwriter John Hodge, and actor Ewan McGregor; documentaries on the making of the film; deleted scenes; and more.

Passions and problems explode when the patriarch of a bustling French-Arab family sets out to open a restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Abdellatif Kechiche, actors Hafsia Herzi and Bouraouïa Marzouk, and the film’s musicians; Sueur, Kechiche’s extended reedit of the climactic belly-dancing sequence; and more.

Following a young boy’s murder, racial tensions explode in a segregated slum in this radically ahead-of-its-time landmark of Afrofuturist cinema.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Ngozi Onwurah, cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, and Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark; a Meet the Filmmakers interview with Onwurah; and more.

Spike Jonze invites you to enter the cerebral cortex of John Malkovich for a wildly surreal, meta-cinematic adventure unlike any other.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Selected-scene audio commentary by Jonze’s friend and competitor Michel Gondry; a behind-the-scenes documentary by filmmaker Lance Bangs; a conversation between Malkovich and humorist John Hodgman; and more.

Southern California teens explore love, sex, and independence in director Amy Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe’s look at the wild world of adolescence.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Heckerling and Crowe; a conversation with Heckerling and Crowe, moderated by filmmaker Olivia Wilde; a documentary featuring interviews with the cast and crew; and more.

Francis Ford Coppola gives mythic dimensions to intimate emotions in this deeply personal tale of estrangement and reconciliation between two rebellious brothers.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Coppola; interviews with Coppola, author and coscreenwriter S. E. Hinton, associate producer Roman Coppola, and actors Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, and Mickey Rourke; and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

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

The films of Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi are feats of alchemy, transforming weighty philosophical exploration into engaging, gracefully humanistic narrative; imbuing epic runtimes with an intimately immersive rhythm that seems to reconfigure time itself; and making conversation-driven, literary dialogue feel elegantly cinematic. Bringing together the richly absorbing portrait of evolving female friendship Happy Hour, the Oscar-winning exploration of grief and unexpected connection Drive My Car, and the enigmatic eco-thriller Evil Does Not Exist, this collection showcases the singular touch of a master.

FEATURING: Happy Hour (2015), Drive My Car (2021), Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

Roy Andersson’s Existential Comedies

Featuring an introduction by filmmaker Ari Aster and cartoonist Daniel Clowes, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

The absurdity of everyday life comes into bleakly humorous focus in the meticulously crafted, miniaturist tragicomedies of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson. Though he has made only six features over the course of a nearly sixty-year career (filling much of his time directing surreal advertisements that earned the admiration of Ingmar Bergman), his later work is constructed with an extraordinary, painterly precision, each frame a deep-focus tableaux teeming with deadpan visual invention. In his acclaimed Living Trilogy—Songs from the Second Floor; You, the Living; and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence—Andersson offers a panoramic vision of modern society through dozens of intricately composed vignettes that explore both the despair and the strange poetry of the human condition.

FEATURING: A Swedish Love Story (1970), Songs from the Second Floor (2000), You, the Living (2007), A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014),* About Endlessness (2019)*

Mary Stephen’s life and career span a remarkable distance of world geography and film history. Born in British Hong Kong and raised in Montreal, she traveled to Paris as a young cinephile and became one of Eric Rohmer’s closest collaborators, serving as his editor and co-composer for many years. She has since become a go-to editor for filmmakers both emerging and established, including Ann Hui. Yet her own work as a director remains relatively underseen. Brimming with discoveries, this collection brings together her newly restored experimental short films, alongside a mesmerizing, Marguerite Duras–inflected vision of unspoken sapphic desire in 1930s Shanghai (Shades of Silk) and a fascinating inquiry into her own complex family history (Palimpsest: The Story of a Name).

FEATURES: Shades of Silk (1978), Palimpsest: The Story of a Name (2025)

SHORTS: Labyrinthe (1973), The Great Canadian Puberty Rite (1974), A Very Easy Death (1975)

New York Documentaries by Bobbito García

Legendary DJ and quintessential New Yorker Bobbito García has been at the forefront of East Coast hip-hop culture since his early days cohosting The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show, the taste-making underground radio show that gave early exposure to artists like Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, and Wu-Tang Clan. Steeped in the vibrant, DIY energy of New York’s street culture, this trio of candid and kinetic documentaries directed by García showcases the intersecting passions—basketball, sneakers, and music—that have defined his life.

FEATURING: Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC (2012), Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives (2015), Rock Rubber 45s (2018)

A Body to Live In

This provocative and revealing look at the rise of BDSM performance art and body-modification culture considers what it means to live freely in one’s own skin.

Two Gods

An intimate documentary about faith, renewal, and healing follows a Muslim casket maker in New Jersey as he takes two teenage apprentices under his wing.

SHORT FILMS

Two Short Films by Elisabeth Subrin

What does it mean to be a woman artist asserting her agency in a capitalist, male-dominated film industry? Inspired by a haunting interview given by actor Maria Schneider, in which she alluded to the trauma of filming Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris opposite Marlon Brando, Elisabeth Subrin’s arresting recreation Maria Schneider, 1983 casts three captivating actors—Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval—as versions of Schneider, giving them space to blend Schneider’s responses with their own unique perspectives on race and gender. In Subrin’s companion short Manal Issa, 2024, the French Lebanese Issa once again answers the same questions, this time fully in her own words as an Arab artist rethinking her priorities amid escalating Israeli air strikes on Lebanon.

FEATURING: Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022), Manal Issa, 2024 (2024)

Duke of Groove

A stacked ensemble cast including Tobey Maguire, Uma Thurman, Udo Kier, and Elliott Gould stars in Griffin Dunne’s woozy, bittersweet portrait of adolescence amid the 1960s counterculture.

Oh, Christmas Tree

MUSIC FILMS

Home of the Brave

Laurie Anderson’s mesmerizing concert film blends video art, puckish wit, and her oddly infectious synth anthems into a singular record of the ’80s avant-garde.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

Drunken Noodles

A young art student’s experiences of sex, creativity, and self-discovery take the form of a languorously dreamy, magical realism–inflected queer fantasia.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Premiering November 1 in Daniel Clowes’s Adventures in Moviegoing: The President’s Analyst*

When the pressures of his job push the president’s shrink over the edge, he goes on the run through a funhouse-mirror version of ’60s America in this psychedelic cult satire.

Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1978 adaptation of Graves’s story amplifies the complexity of sound, imbuing it with the ability to seduce, destroy, and even kill. A clap of thunder, the distant peal of church bells, the squeak of a shoe buckle: the noises featured in The Shout are indeed curious, possessed of a unique power over the characters and, by extension, the audience. The film’s use of sound places it in dialogue with the tradition of horror cinema, whose sonic dimension is crucial to its evocation of the unknown, the supernatural, and other things that go bump in the night.

Sparing in its genre trappings, The Shout is not quite a horror movie, but it does explore themes of terror and uncertainty. Set in and around a cozy rural village amid the verdant pastureland and ragged coastline of North Devon, the film begins with a cricket match held at a mental institution. Here, an enigmatic patient named Charles Crossley (Alan Bates) narrates a story to a visitor (Tim Curry) named Robert Graves. The tale concerns Crossley’s visit to the remote cottage home of a local married couple, Rachel and Anthony Fielding (Susannah York and John Hurt), where he insinuates himself and gradually establishes his dominance—physical, psychological, and sexual—over the household. A dark and sinister presence, Crossley purports to have gained a kind of ritual ability during his eighteen years of living among the Indigenous people of Australia’s Northern Territory. Among the skills he acquired there is the ability to cast spells on people by stealing their personal objects, as he does with Rachel by using her shoe buckle. Even more frightening is his claim of mastery over the “terror shout,” a cry so forceful that it can cause severe injury or even death.

Blending elements of psychological thriller, social satire, and psychedelic film, The Shout falls into the category of folk horror, a recently coined term often applied to works that stage a terrifying encounter between a modern world that believes itself “civilized” and the revenant, supernatural energies of the past, typically embodied by “archaic” peoples, objects, or rituals. Authors such as M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, and H. P. Lovecraft have retroactively been cast as the leading figures of this genre, which revolves around stories about history exacting punishment on the present. Folk horror first emerged in British cinema with a wave of low-budget films in the 1970s, including Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), and lives on in such recent works as Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019).

The apparent source of horror in The Shout—the colonized Indigenous people whose powers have supposedly warped Crossley’s mind and moral compass—exists almost entirely offscreen. But we need not take the man’s highly dubious word on his encounters abroad, because the film makes clear that the true danger lies elsewhere, in the seemingly innocuous milieu of “normal” society, and in the rationalist certitude, erect postures, fussy mores, and starched cricket whites of its elite. Their comfort and narrow worldview have relied, in large part, on colonial violence and dispossession. (Is there a better metaphor for England’s social dysfunction than a cricket match held on the grounds of an insane asylum in a field full of cow shit?) Crucially, the unreality of this realm relies on the distortion and erasure of that subjugation. When Rachel and Anthony awake from the same dream near the start of the film, their shared vision—of a Black Indigenous man in a military coat from eighteenth-century Europe, menacing them with a sharpened bone—betrays this historical amnesia.

“Every word of what I’m going to tell you is true,” Crossley informs Graves at the start of his tale. “Only I’m telling it in a different way. It’s always the same story . . . but I change the sequence of events, and I vary the climaxes a little, because I like to keep it alive.” As played by Bates, Crossley is a figure of wild contrasts; he speaks in the actor’s low, sonorous voice, with a crisp, patrician accent honed at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but he is also occasionally prone to far-fetched bits of folklore and philosophy, outlandish declarations, and shocking confessions. We would be right to be skeptical, as Anthony is, of what Crossley says about the “terror shout.” Indeed, even when he demonstrates it for his host—in a remote locale in the vast, windswept sand dunes—its true purpose and power remain as opaque as everything else about Crossley.

The terror of English civilization is deepened by the characters’ (principally Anthony’s) anxieties about masculinity, desire, and sexual potency. In this way, the film anticipates Skolimowski’s first American film, The Lightship (1985), which pits Robert Duvall’s dandy, queer-coded psychopath against Klaus Maria Brandauer’s oddly passive naval captain during a hostage takeover. In both films, the intrusion of a stranger into the protagonist’s world exposes the latter’s weakness and hypocrisy. It also seems to surface a degree of homosexual panic—an erotic tension between the two men and a fear of bodily proximity and domination. The “terror shout” is, after all, penetrative, which is why Anthony heeds Crossley’s advice to stuff candle wax in his ears for protection. Crossley’s insidious home invasion also entails the sexual conquest of Rachel, rendering Anthony a cuckold in his own house. The nature of the Fieldings’ relationship is itself quite unclear: it is at times very affectionate and intimate, and at others marked by indiscretion and lies.

In Bates, Hurt, and York, the film boasts a formidable cast. All three are among the most important actors of their generation, and each had by then amassed a remarkable body of work on stage and screen. In placing them alongside one another, Skolimowski heightens the tension of the characters’ power struggles, making deft use of his performers’ strikingly disparate body types and demeanors. As Anthony, Hurt sports a floppy head of fair hair and moves clumsily, his slight frame giving him a boyish appearance that is belied by his trademark gravelly voice. Contrasting with Bates—who is dark and imposing of stature, with a hint of romantic volatility and an almost Wellesian comportment—Hurt appears vulnerable, as he does in many of his key roles during this period: in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), where he is violently ruptured by an extraterrestrial fetus, and in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), where his entire body is a tortured form. He also often appears smaller in the frame than York’s Rachel, whose broad physicality makes her more at home in their cozy farmhouse than her skinny, nervy husband. Like her bold turns in Robert Aldrich’s The Killing of Sister George (1968) and Robert Altman’s Images (1972), York’s performance here feels very lived-in; her character is sensuous and mercurial both as a partner to Anthony and as a lover-slave to Crossley. In fact, while the film—which is filtered through Crossley’s perspective and foregrounds Anthony’s neurotic unraveling—seems to center a power struggle between men, Rachel is the most complex and variable of the trio, alternately submissive and dominant, grounded and untethered, warm and remote.

While it mines much of the same material found throughout the horror genre, The Shout belongs to a parallel cinematic lineage—more art-house than grindhouse. It was the first film produced by Jeremy Thomas’s legendary Recorded Picture Company, which would go on to make Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987), David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996), Jonathan Glazer’s Sexy Beast (2000), and Skolimowski’s EO (2022). The Shout is also a significant milestone in the long, storied career of its director. After leaving his native Poland in 1967, Skolimowski had an itinerant phase that yielded international coproductions in Belgium, Italy, and elsewhere in Europe. The Shout, which would go on to win the Grand Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival, came in the middle of his highly productive decade-and-a-half sojourn in England, which began with his surrealist cult classic Deep End (1970) and ended with Success Is the Best Revenge (1984), a quasi-autobiographical film about a Polish theater director and his family exiled in England during the era of the antiauthoritarian Solidarność (or Solidarity) movement.

Despite the half century that separates Graves’s story from Skolimowski’s film—for which the director shares a writing credit with the original screenwriter, Michael Austin—The Shout is remarkably faithful to its source. Graves was an English poet and novelist who is now probably best known for I, Claudius, his 1934 novel about ancient Rome. (Notably, Hurt appeared in the role of Caligula in a TV adaptation of the book broadcast on the BBC in 1976.) The film retains his frame story and evokes his language’s eerie slippage between the mundane and the uncanny by frequently interrupting the narrative with dreams, premonitions, and hallucinations, destabilizing our sense of what is real and what the characters merely imagine. It also makes use of Graves’s sexual frankness. Bisexual and polyamorous, the author presents the Fieldings as a surprisingly modern couple for interwar Britain, suggesting they are in something of an open marriage. In fact, Graves, who wrote the story while suffering from the aftereffects of his service in the First World War, was partly inspired by his own experiences of being in a throuple with his first wife, Nancy Nicholson, and the poet Laura Riding.

Some of the principal differences between the story and the film stem from the specific possibilities of their respective mediums. As literature, the former need only evoke the power of sound; the latter must let us hear it. Fortunately, in Skolimowski, The Shout has a director who has consistently demonstrated an inventive and experimental approach to sound design since his first feature—Identification Marks: None (1965), made while he was enrolled at the legendary Łódź Film School—which combines musical score, sound effects, and voice into rich and unusual soundscapes based in montage, layering, and postsynchronization. Later in his career, he increasingly incorporated popular music into his films’ soundtracks: Cat Stevens and Can both provided music for Deep End, and Genesis’s Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford supplied the main musical motif for The Shout—the sweeping ambient instrumental track “From the Undertow,” which also appears on Banks’s 1979 debut solo album, A Curious Feeling.

In The Shout, Skolimowski also makes use of a different kind of audio—synthetically generated sounds and musique concrète, which are often intertwined with the score. Created by the prolific composer and record producer Rupert Hine, these sonic elements have a place within the narrative: Anthony is himself a musician, playing organ for the local church and crafting experimental electronic music at home. The scenes where we see him at work in the studio are brief but indelible. He records a handful of marbles rolling around in a metal tray filled with water, draws a violin bow across shards of a cut-up sardine tin, lights and draws on a cigarette, and strokes the fur of his dog, Buzz, with a microphone. Anthony’s compositions are apparently based on recordings of everyday sonic events that are sampled, filtered, and warped into electronic gurgles through a series of synthesizers and sequencers. Behind the scenes, this was the same process Skolimowski’s team used to create the “terror shout” itself: processing and layering dozens of sound effects (a rocket launch, Niagara Falls) and combining them with the director’s own sustained, bloodcurdling yowl.

The actual synthesizers we see on-screen—which include a Synthi VCS3 and a Synthi Sequencer 256—were cutting-edge audio tech in 1978, manufactured by Electronic Music Studios (EMS), a company cofounded by the English Australian electronic-music pioneer Tristram Cary. Staples of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, these instruments were essential tools in the seventies prog-rock arsenal, used by King Crimson, Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, and many others. Their appearance in The Shout self-consciously situates it in a specific musical milieu, as well as in an early wave of films in which composers such as Wendy Carlos, Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter, and Vangelis employed new forms of electronic instrumentation for scoring and sound effects. (Skolimowski would continue to explore this interest in his later work, collaborating with a young Hans Zimmer on the scores for Moonlighting, from 1982, and Success Is the Best Revenge.)

The artists in Skolimowski’s films often seem like self-parodies, so it is unclear how seriously we are to take Anthony’s experiments. The rather pretentious nature of his music is telegraphed by the mood board of images pasted up around his studio: photographs of the ovens at Auschwitz and of the body of a dead girl lying in a rubble-strewn street, along with paintings by Francis Bacon and Edvard Munch. Crossley himself dismisses Anthony’s music as “nothing . . . empty.” And yet, as The Shout continually proclaims to us, sound is never nothing, never mere vibration, but is instead sinister in its complexity, capable of affecting us in deeply visceral ways we don’t even notice. Don’t believe your ears.

One word; two worlds.

It isn’t all that surprising that Welcome II the Terrordome’s radical storytelling was received with so much confusion. Onwurah’s vision of how racism and bigotry could look in the future was not sympathetic to the white gaze. It blasted the postracial illusion and did not position white people as saviors or allies but as corrupt, or even plain evil. It showed anti-Blackness as a system that underpins the modern world, and it challenged the idea of the West as a meritocracy, something that many white liberals had long believed in.

If white critics saw Welcome II the Terrordome as provocative or hyperbolic, it was because they could not or did not want to reckon with the real current and historical events that informed the film, be it the crack epidemic of the 1980s and early ’90s, which had destroyed entire communities in the U.S., or the neoliberal policies of Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990, which had resulted in a deep recession and long-term unemployment.

As Sylvia Wynter writes about in the 1977 essay “ ‘We Know Where We Are From’: The Politics of Black Culture from Myal to Marley,” lowly unskilled “native”/“negro” cum casual laborers and school dropouts had been finding themselves redundant in their nations and in an increasingly automated labor market. They were “relegated, thereby, to their criminalized, impoverished ‘inner city ghettos,’ together with the latter’s prison extensions, as a permanent underclass mired in poverty,” she writes.

Onwurah also roots Welcome II the Terrordome in an understanding of African mythology, which includes folklore, deities, and cosmological concepts. Those themes and Welcome II the Terrordome’s use of speculative fictional forms to imagine Black people into an alternate reality—even if that reality is a bleak dystopia based on the kind of brutality members of the Black diaspora were facing in real life—place the film in creative sympathy with the Afrofuturist movement. Black people had typically been excluded from science fiction, despite the clear parallels between sci-fi tropes of societies facing exclusion, isolation, and disempowerment at the hands of tyrannical forces and the everyday experiences of working-class Black communities. Welcome II the Terrordome is foundational in showing that Black storytelling isn’t monolithic—it can be expansive and experimental.

The film opens with a reimagining of the 1803 Igbo landing at Saint Simons Island, Georgia, where seventy-five captured Igbo people from what is now Nigeria took control of their slave ship and committed mass suicide to avoid submitting to slavery in the United States. We see them submerge themselves in the water, their chained bodies falling deeper and deeper into the abyss. “Most people nowadays think that we simply drowned, but on that day long ago, we proved everybody wrong,” a male voice-over says. Their bodies end up in “a place where neither our spirits were free nor our bodies were dead.” It’s a place that has many names: Babylon, no-man’s-land, Transdean (the official name of the film’s slum), the Terrordome (as it is known to its inhabitants).

As the gates to the Terrordome open, a voice can be heard saying, “If you don’t know your past, you don’t know your future.” The line furthers the idea that this story is about what it means to exist in a transitional zone, caught between history and the future, between imprisonment and freedom. The Black people living in the Terrordome are not in chains, but they are not liberated either. They are confined to a site that is rife with decay and poverty, “a dirty, rancid, stinking shithole,” as the voice-over says. A police car makes its way through the Terrordome, and onlookers jeer and shout from the sides of the streets. It’s clear that, in this dystopian reality, the police force still functions as an extension of white supremacy—constantly surveilling, constantly dominating.

Early on, hip-hop is introduced as a key component of the film, which takes its name from a 1990 Public Enemy song. You can hear the New York group’s influence in the style of rapping that features throughout the film. It’s in the cadence, the punchy beats, the sociopolitical lyrics. Many of the songs on its soundtrack were produced by the British MC Black Radical MKII, a.k.a. Felix Joseph, who also plays the character named Black Rad. Onwurah has said that she used hip-hop in the film for its ability to be blunt and hard-hitting while still being listenable and providing some form of relief. It’s true. The music helps to carry context and thoughts that would otherwise be too wordy for dialogue or voice-over. The lyrics are directly linked to and provide commentary on the plotlines, giving the film a musical theater–like quality. There are lines about how every man has a price, how it’s better to sell drugs than to take them, how you should keep an automatic gun in the small of your back, how you should keep your dick hard, and how if a man’s from hell, you should send him back. Is it on the nose? Yes. But it prepares you for some of the brutal scenes you’re about to witness.

Onwurah saw Welcome II the Terrordome as a hip-hop film in the tradition of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), which itself makes good use of another Public Enemy song, “Fight the Power.” There are nods to Do the Right Thing throughout: a central character is called Spike; music and DJ culture bring people together. Movies such as the cult-classic comedy House Party (1990) and the seminal hood drama Boyz n the Hood (1991) had also featured hip-hop soundtracks that caught on with audiences. But Onwurah’s use of the music was as much about continuing the kind of oral storytelling that can be traced back to West African griot traditions as it was about harnessing the popularity of the genre.

The actors from the Igbo-landing scene take on new roles in the film’s present day, perhaps as a gesture to the belief among members of the African diaspora that we are spiritually tethered to our ancestors. The main narrative starts as a familiar ghetto tale of a gang leader living a double life. Rad shares a tender kiss with his wife, Anjela, as he leaves their apartment to sell drugs to sustain the family. But we see from the get-go that his two lives are not wholly separate, when Anjela’s sister uses drugs in the flat straight after Anjela puts the kids to bed. The scene then cuts to a pregnant white woman called Jodie, in another Terrordome room with Anjela’s brother, Spike, who cuts the white powder he plans to sell to “white trash” alongside Rad as part of the Blue Gang. Spike and Jodie argue about his disdain for white people, but he eventually comforts her, telling her she is “one of us” because she is pregnant with his Black child. When they climb into bed to make love, the purple-blue lighting enhances this most erotic moment of the film. Here, interracial love is beautified, though perhaps in juxtaposition with the destruction it will later catalyze.

Violence and brutality are not undercurrents of Welcome II the Terrordome; they are at its core. In films depicting gang violence, there are frequently scenes of torture and suffering, but here, watching a man scream and beg for his life as he is chained up, covered in gasoline, and set on fire by the opposing Red Gang is true horror. The grit and immediacy of such scenes, shot on very little money, make them terrifying in ways a bigger budget might have rendered overpolished.

Because of an opportunity to expand the gang’s drug-dealing operation to the white world outside the Terrordome, there is tension in the air. Rad tells Spike that he questions Jodie’s loyalty, implying that her whiteness means she is likely to betray them. Even though she rejects this idea, her presence in the Terrordome does exactly that. After her abusive white ex-boyfriend sees her hanging out with the Black folks, the night takes a sudden turn. Rad raps about Spike’s love of white girls and how he didn’t think “that who he sleeping with could have such an effect on my wife and my kids.” The lyrics let us know exactly what the takeaway is: sleeping with the enemy means they all will pay the cost. The eeriness that follows peaks when Hector, Anjela and Rad’s young son, sneaks out of the house to attend the Blue Gang’s party, unbeknownst to his mother, who is busy dancing. In what feels like foreshadowing, the camera zooms in on a shattered photograph of Jodie’s face.

Writing in Cinema Journal in 1999, Anne Ciecko noted that it was “unclear where the film stands on race mixing because of its sympathy for the plight of the white character Jodie.” Onwurah was born in Nigeria in 1966 to a Nigerian father and a white British mother, and raised in Newcastle, England. Her first film, Coffee Coloured Children, released in 1988, is an autobiographical work exploring the internalized anti-Blackness experienced by two mixed-race children. The filmmaker appears to have a personal investment in exploring the dynamics of intimate relations between Black men and white women, but it seems to be less about positioning them as either holy or evil than as unsustainable while the fight for Black liberation is ongoing. There’s a naivety in Jodie and Spike’s belief that love can conquer all, a myth that is quickly exploded when Jodie’s ex crashes the Blue Gang’s party (which before this offered a brief moment of joy) and repeatedly punches Jodie in the stomach, causing her to suffer a miscarriage.

The boy Hector, who was hiding when Jodie’s ex and his white mob arrived, jumps out of the dark, shouting for them to stop. But his choice to defend Jodie ultimately leads to his own tragic end. He is menacingly chased through a building before bursting through a door and falling to his death. The bird’s-eye view of his body, blood pooling behind his head, is deeply harrowing. When Anjela, looking for her missing son, eventually finds his corpse, her scream is bodily, visceral. It’s a sound only a grieving mother could make.

In Hector, you can’t help but see every Black boy killed at the hands of racism. You see Emmett Till lynched in Mississippi in 1955. You see Stephen Lawrence stabbed by a group of white thugs in southeast London in 1993. You see Trayvon Martin shot by George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012. The death of Hector Pieterson, a South African schoolboy who was shot and killed during the Soweto uprising and massacre in 1976, was a direct inspiration for this section of Welcome II the Terrordome. Later in the film, Rad carries Hector’s body during a memorial ceremony in a way that mirrors Pieterson’s lifeless body being carried, as seen in a widely circulated photograph taken by Sam Nzima. Onwurah has said that connecting the diasporas in this way was an intentional choice.

However, Welcome II the Terrordome does not end with tragedy alone. It doesn’t end with the heavy heart of a woman forced to make peace with her son’s untimely death, as so many Black mothers have had to do in the real world. When Anjela sees the white gang responsible for her son’s demise, she points a gun and shoots them down. Calmly. No hesitation. It’s almost as if there’s a spirit gently guiding her hand. She goes on to shoot the police too. The actor Suzette Llewellyn, who plays Anjela, does a brilliant job of embodying her sense of detachment. Viewers get to live out their revenge fantasies vicariously through her, which is effective not least because of how different revenge is from hate. Revenge is about retribution, which implies the pursuit of justice. Hate is unfocused, undefinable, messy. Hate is what the police who harass the inhabitants of the Terrordome feel. Hate is what Jodie’s ex feels as he smears her face with her own blood. Anjela’s “killing spree” is a rare scene of a Black woman leaning into her anger. Her rage isn’t hysterical or easy to dismiss as a shock tactic. It is pointed and confident. It’s a foreseeable part of the trajectory of a life lived under such subjugation, even if it ends with her own hanging.

Welcome II the Terrordome puts forward the questions of whether forgiveness is a necessary part of freedom and whether empathy is progressive or holds us back. When Anjela’s sister begs her grandmother to help her look after the beaten-up Jodie, the older woman has no interest. “Enough is enough,” she says. For her, Jodie symbolizes distraction. She is a figment of Babylon.

Echoing throughout the film are the radical words and ideologies of revolutionary and Black nationalist leader Malcolm X, most notably a line from a 1963 speech: “We’re nonviolent with people who are nonviolent with us. But we are not nonviolent with anyone who is violent with us.” Thus, the film ends with fire, riots, and the Blue Gang hijacking a mainstream television station to broadcast a Black-liberation manifesto. “The mother is rising,” Rad concludes.

Welcome II the Terrordome’s final images depict the drowned enslaved people from the begin­ning emerging from the water. This is intercut with a scene of Anjela in the middle of the street in daylight. Both she and one of the enslaved men break free from their chains, implying that there is hope after resistance. If Welcome II the Terrordome was ahead of its time when it was first released, it can finally rest in the here and now.

Born in 1961 in the Himalayan Buddhist Kingdom of Bhutan as the son and grandson of leading Buddhist teachers, and trained since childhood as a monk, he got his start in film as the Buddhism advisor to Bernardo Bertolucci on location for Little Buddha (1993), in which he ultimately also had a small but meaningful speaking role. Inspired by the experience, he soon after wrote his first screenplay, and the resulting feature film, directed by him and produced by the legendary Jeremy Thomas (among others), was the surprise 1999 indie hit The Cup, a neorealist dramedy about a group of soccer-obsessed young monks at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India.

Norbu’s subsequent films have been made in Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, all with nonprofessionals in front of and behind the camera. His success in film has in a way inspired a generation of filmmakers in Bhutan, including Pawo Choyning Dorji, his producer for the 2016 Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait, whose own debut feature as director, Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, was Bhutan’s official submission to the Academy Awards and garnered a nomination for Best International Feature—a historic first for the kingdom.

Norbu, whose films can now be viewed on the Criterion Channel, was certainly not the first filmmaker to undertake Buddhist stories—Bertolucci, Scorsese, Im Kwon-taek, Annaud, Ichikawa, and others (dating back to Franz Osten and Himansu Rai in 1925) preceded him. But he was the first Buddhist teacher to take up cinema (a few have since followed), as much an indication of his unique gifts as of the changing landscape for Buddhist traditions around the world.

This interview was conducted over multiple conversations.

Given your intensive traditional training and education as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, what led you to cinema?

In a word, storytelling. As soon as videotapes became available (yes, monks have TVs!), I became fascinated with the power of movies, the emotional influence of storytelling through sound and motion pictures. I also see in filmmaking—directing and editing—a connection to vipassana meditation, where you bring your attention to one thing. But it’s also that Buddhist traditions have always embraced art forms to express wisdom and compassion, and perhaps we can look at cinema as a possible modern form of thangka painting, which is an older way to tell stories. Making a good film is somewhat like doing a good Buddhist practice—both require an awareness of how we’re conditioned.

Who were your inspirations?

I was particularly inspired by the films of Yasujiro Ozu, his simple subject matter and static camera work. I also like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Antonioni, Satyajit Ray’s films, Kubrick’s 2001, Kurosawa, Kiarostami, Imamura . . . One of my favorite films is Natural Born Killers, by Oliver Stone.

For your first professional project, you got to work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha. How did that come about? And what was it like with him?

I was in London (this was the early ’90s), ostensibly studying comparative religion at SOAS (School of Oriental Studies), but I was mostly just watching lots of movies. A friend told me that Bertolucci wanted to meet me, having heard that a Buddhist lama was in town. We met and spent a lot of time discussing philosophy—Buddhist, yes, but also existentialism, Marxism, all kinds of things. He was very interested in reincarnation, of course, and we discussed the differences between reincarnation, emanations, and avatars. I gave some advice to Bernardo and the screenwriter, Rudy Wurlitzer, on philosophical issues in Buddhism, and on set I made suggestions about where ritual objects might go, and what kind of movements and behaviors would be normaI for a lama, things like that. Bernardo made it clear he saw the film as a children’s movie, and I was all in favor of that. I ended up having a bit part in the film that wasn’t in the script. There was some sort of delay on set, and Bernardo asked me to improvise. I think, though, I learned more about filmmaking from watching the interaction between him and his great cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro.

The Cup was an audacious debut. How did you come to write it?

That was based on a true story! Growing up in a monastery, I knew that monks are obsessed with football [soccer]. Monks are just human, with normal enthusiasms, especially the young ones. Satyajit Ray’s simple approach to storytelling gave me the confidence to try to make a film. I wanted to maybe demystify the Western sense of Tibetan Buddhist monastery life. Making that film in a real monastery, with mostly monks performing all the roles, involved the whole community, and they had to do their meditations and prayers at 4 a.m. before filming began for the day.

The late Jeremy Thomas, who was Bertolucci’s longtime producer, came on board as a producer and executive producer for The Cup. How did that come about?

Jeremy was on set for Little Buddha, of course, and one day we were flying from Bangkok to Paro [in Bhutan], and there’s not much to do on those Drukair flights, so I was reviewing my script. He was sitting right behind me, and he asked me what I was working on. I told him it was the first draft of a script, and he asked to read it. He read it right then and asked if I really wanted to do it, and I said yes, and he said he’d help. Eventually his Hanway Films took on international sales. He was always interested in my films, and even if he wasn’t officially involved he offered advice and encouragement. I owe him a lot.

You once gave a talk called “Life as Cinema.” What was that about?

Cinema can perhaps be understood as a metaphor for the Buddhist teachings about samsara and nirvana, right? Suppose we were born in a cinema. We only know what’s on the screen; we don’t know it’s only a projection, that nothing is real, that nothing we see has a true existence. But someone in the theater says, “This is just a movie, it’s not really happening.” Perhaps we get it, and then we can just relax and enjoy the show, enjoy the drama, the emotions, not get lost. Well, Buddhist practitioners train to understand, to internalize, that this life—samsara/nirvana—is as essenceless as a movie. Getting even just a glimpse that appearances are not real can give us confidence. It’s more complicated than that of course, but . . .

In most of your films there’s a suggestion of amusement, not just in the stories themselves, but in the tone of the performances, and by extension, in your direction. How do you see that?

Some of that is just in the nature of the stories, but perhaps there is something of the Buddhist view that what we ordinarily experience is without essence, and that can be funny if we see that, no? Amusement at the delusion sort of lurks beneath the surface.

Why do you tend to work with nonprofessionals?

Mostly out of necessity! I make these films on very low budgets, so there’s that. I also enjoy offering young people a chance to learn about filmmaking, about teamwork, about technology, etc. It’s also true that nonactors often are capable of giving very believable performances if given the right environment.

Some find Hema Hema your most mysterious film, primarily because we rarely see anyone’s face. What’s it really about?

That film was an experimental approach to some ideas about identity and the sense of self. The use of masks in a ritualized setting brings to mind Carnival/Carnevale, celebrated in some Christian cultures before the observance of the abstemious Lent each year, an accepted way to briefly be free of one’s identity and any rules that limit experience. We filmed that in Bhutan and were a bit surprised it was banned there, for using masks outside of traditional Buddhist rituals.

Do you have an audience in mind when you write your scripts?

I wish I was that disciplined, but no. I have stories I’d like to tell, but even I don’t know who they’re for, even after I’m done. I am aware that this film may not be for a wide audience or that film might work well in such-and-such a country, but it’s never intentional. I’m always grateful for whatever audience finds these films of interest.

Which is the film you’re most satisfied with?

I have to say Pig at the Crossing. It’s a film about the bardo of dying, that liminal interval between this life and what’s next that can be a time of confusion, fear, attachment, frustration, etc. Bardo also can refer to the interval between birth and death, of course . . .

Image at top of page © Pawo Choyning Dorji

Then there was the 1967 Maoist uprising in the village of Naxalbari, in northern West Bengal. Led by tribal Santal peasants and Communist leaders, it was soon spreading throughout the countryside, tearing apart a left already beleaguered by the Sino-Soviet split. By 1969, the movement had spilled over into the city: in April of that year, the architects of the Naxalbari revolt announced the formation of a new, revolutionary party—the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist)—in Calcutta. Students dropped out of universities and joined the armed struggle in droves.

For many of those tumultuous months, Satyajit Ray was not in Calcutta. The situation was not conducive to making films, he had said in a letter to critic and biographer Marie Seton in 1967, before setting out to the forts of Rajasthan and the snowy valleys of Himachal Pradesh to make a musical fantasy for children, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1969). In the early and middle months of 1969, he was in Palamu, a wooded tribal region more than three hundred miles to the west of Calcutta, in what was then the Indian state of Bihar. Ironically, Ray was there shooting Days and Nights in the Forest (1970), a film about four bachelors who also leave the roil of the city for the respite of the countryside. The sole, stray glimpse in the film of the events of the day is a copy of the Calcutta newspaper the Statesman, whose headline—“Another Sino-Soviet Border Clash Reported”—is fuzzily visible as one of the men sets it on fire and declares, “All connection with civilization is over.”

Ray’s absence from the melee angered viewers and critics. His influence was already tremendous—so much so that he had managed to persuade Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to release Utpal Dutt, who had been imprisoned for his Marxist publications, so the actor could work on the Merchant Ivory film The Guru (1969). Yet Ray’s films, commentators argued, were apolitical. While colleagues like Mrinal Sen and Ritwik Ghatak were responding to the moment with angsty Brechtian polemics, he was making movies about fantastical kingdoms and the holidays of bourgeois youth in picturesque locations. Ray didn’t necessarily refute the charge but insisted that he was not interested in ideology as much as in individual motivations. “A person with a definite political line is often psychologically less interesting,” he once said in an interview. “Revolutionaries don’t think for themselves all the time.”

By 1970, he had conceded that his cinema had to confront the times. After Days and Nights in the Forest, he embarked on his Calcutta trilogy, starting with the bristling, burning The Adversary (1970)—a film he described to Seton as “basically though not blatantly pro-revolution—because I feel nothing else can set the country up on its feet.” The protagonist, one among the hundreds of unemployed youths trying to find a job, remains somewhat ambivalent and disaffected; he is angry but unsure until the very end of what to do with his mounting rage. But his brother sets off to join the Naxals, and the young militant’s clear-cut conviction throws our hero’s aimless drift into relief.

The Calcutta trilogy is often considered Ray’s decisive political turn. But I’ve always found Days and Nights in the Forest to be the real key to his evolution as a director—a film whose structuring absences reveal an artist grappling with the inadequacy of his mode for the moment.

Ray’s cinema had sprouted from the literary word. Of the nearly twenty films he had made by 1970, only two were based on original screenplays (1962’s Kanchenjunga and 1966’s The Hero); the rest were adapted from either short stories or novels. For him, reality was filtered through the lens of the modernist novel, which centered the individual as the subject of history; literature was his conduit to the inner truths of everyday people, rendered distinct and psychologically complex, unlike the broad archetypes of commercial cinema. He was a particular devotee of modern Bengali literature, and his films are less indebted to neorealism—a label that chased him throughout his career and beyond—than to a kind of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary realism. “The true basis of the film style of Pather Panchali is not neorealist cinema or any other school of cinema or even any individual work of cinema, but the novel of Bibhutibhusan [Banerjee] itself,” Ray wrote.

Days and Nights in the Forest continues that tradition—it is adapted from a
novel by Sunil Gangopadhyay, who also wrote the book that inspired The Adversary—but it also questions it, evincing metatextual traces of self-doubt. In Gangopadhyay’s semi-autobiographical text, four city-bred youths get on a train to the countryside without a destination in mind and get off arbitrarily in the town of Dhalbhumgarh on the recommendation of a fellow passenger. In the film, these men—Ashim, Shekhar, Sanjoy, Hari—are headed by car to a premeditated destination, Palamu, inspired by a famous travelogue from the 1880s by Sanjib Chandra Chattopadhyay. In the opening scenes, Sanjoy (Subhendu Chatterjee) is reading excerpts from the text’s exoticist descriptions of the area’s natural beauty, including that of its Indigenous Santal women. “They are all as black as ebony and in the bloom of youth,” reads out Sanjoy, exciting his car-mates. “Their groins are scantily covered with a small piece of fabric.” The rest of the film will slowly strip our protagonists of the illusions that texts such as these, filtered through the paternalistic voyeurism of the urban intellectual, have conjured for them.

Much of the film concerns the men’s nasty lording of bourgeois privilege over the poor tribal workers of Palamu. They find a forest bungalow and decide to set up camp there; when the caretaker protests, insisting that a reservation is required to stay in the house, Ashim (Soumitra Chatterjee) hands him some cash and Shekhar (Rabi Ghosh) bullies him into submission, muttering, “Thank God for corruption.” They hire a local youth, Lakha, as an errand boy, before Hari (Samit Bhanja) wrongly accuses him of stealing a wallet and kicks him out. At the village bar, they soak up the local mahua and marvel at the Santal women who, too, partake in alcohol. One of them, Duli (the fair-skinned Simi Garewal in unfortunate brownface), catches Hari’s eye, and later he will demean and seduce her. The men’s performance of superiority is punctured only by their encounter with two refined young women from Calcutta, Aparna (Sharmila Tagore) and her widowed sister-in-law, Jaya (Kaberi Bose), who are also holidaying in Palamu.

Masculine fragility is one of Ray’s enduring themes; his male characters tend to be insecure, indecisive, even pathetic. Both Amal and Bhupati in Charulata (1964) are oblivious in their own ways, blinkered by their self-important preoccupations. In The Hero, Uttam Kumar’s Arindam Mukherjee drowns his regrets and the loneliness of fame in drink. In Kanchenjunga, the industrialist patriarch is so intent on imposing his choices on his daughter that he fails to see not only her true self but also the mountain peak for which he has traveled all this way when it emerges from the clouds. Each of these characters is frustrated by a woman whose self-possession assaults his pride. And yet Ray’s men are almost never entirely irredeemable. One of my favorite moments in his filmography comes when the husband in The Big City (1963), who has grown resentful of his wife’s success at work while he endures unemployment, tells her that by standing up to her boss to defend a mistreated colleague, she has shown more courage than he ever could have.

Days and Nights in the Forest, however, gives us no such reprieve from the small-mindedness of its men. The film is biting in its critique: in a memorable scene, Aparna tells Ashim that when she first saw him, she thought, “It would be nice to crush this gentleman’s confidence a little.” Soumitra Chatterjee reportedly disliked the characters of the movie, though he admired Ray’s style; he preferred Gangopadhyay’s characters, who he believed still retained some vestiges of idealism. The men of Days and Nights in the Forest are lost causes.

The tension at the heart of the film is that all of this moral ugliness unfolds with splendid visual grace. I already knew Days and Nights in the Forest was an exquisite film when, years ago, I first saw a grimy, pixelated version on YouTube; the restoration, with its deep shadows and sharp, sun-scorched silhouettes, is breathtaking. The beauty, as always with Ray, is less a function of what’s in front of the camera—although the svelte Tagore, with her dimpled smile and kohl-lined eyes, and Soumitra Chatterjee, tall and elegant, are beauty epitomized—than of how the camera perceives its subjects. Like so many of his films, Days and Nights in the Forest frames a distinct point of view right from the beginning: the artful calligraphy of the opening credits perforates a black screen, the letters becoming narrow windows through which we see the forest pass by in a blur.

Pauline Kael described the film as “overwhelmingly, sometimes unbearably beautiful.” Like most of Ray’s work, it emanates something larger than the sum of its parts: a transcendent sense of harmony that feels deeply satisfying and intuitive. Each shot is perfectly choreographed yet unshowy, and sharpens the characters’ personalities. The camera looks at the suave, sophisticated Ashim, a rising star at a corporate job, from a low angle, framing his towering figure against a bright, hot sky. It peeks at the diminutive Shekhar, the jester of the group, from behind a car, so that his head seems to emerge comically from the hood. It attends to how the wind ruffles the bookish Sanjoy’s floppy hair and how sweat glistens on cricket star Hari’s handsome, arrogant face. Ray’s gaze endows people and places with a radiance that pleases and soothes, like a new-yet-familiar tune. How bad could someone or something be if looked at with such rapture?

This contradiction between appearances and intentions—between surface and depth—is a central tension of Days and Nights in the Forest, and it plays out in the film’s iconic “memory game” sequence. The four men and two women go around adding names to a list that each of them must recite again from the start; whoever slips up and misses a name loses. The invocation of memory, and the game’s structure of spontaneity, implies an unearthing of sorts, something summoned from the subconscious. But the references thrown about—Marx, Mao, Shakespeare, Cleopatra, Tagore—are rarefied and pretentious. The game is about perception rather than remembering, about gazes rather than words. Sanjoy begins to pick up on Jaya’s flirtations and rushes inside to fetch her a pillow, pausing to check his hair in the mirror. Ashim and Aparna last the longest, trading names like Cupid’s arrows, until Aparna concedes the game to Ashim, recognizing that what’s at stake here isn’t memory but desire.

Indeed, the game completes a shift that begins earlier, the moment Aparna and Jaya appear: rather than a story about men encountering nature, it becomes that well-worn tale of men encountering desirable women. Our heroes proclaim that they’ve come to Palamu to give in to the therapeutic pleasures of primitivity, but the flimsiest of their commitments to bare their inner, uncultivated selves—not to shave during their stay in Palamu—goes out the window once the ladies enter the picture. Yet Sanjoy can’t even muster lust, the basest of base impulses, when Jaya offers herself to him, decked in glowing tribal jewelry; he is paralyzed by fear. What they truly desire is desire itself, a force powerful enough to pierce through their alienation and draw them into the present. It doesn’t come.

Ray has employed tragedy before—in The Apu Trilogy, in Devi (1960), in The Music Room (1958). Driving back to the city in Ashim’s handsome car, the characters of Days and Nights in the Forest in some ways resemble the feudal aristocrat of The Music Room, clinging to a world that is rapidly receding into the past. But there is no tragedy at the conclusion of Days and Nights in the Forest; only unease, a sense of irresolution. Aparna chastises Ashim for his naive indifference to the suffering of others, including that of the caretaker he and his mates have pushed around while the man’s wife fights a grave illness. But when Aparna goes with him to the caretaker’s house, she only looks through the window and says she’ll talk to her father to have the matter “settled.” She may be worldlier than Ashim, and more experienced in loss and pain, but she is no less passive an observer of a burning world.

Hari, meanwhile, is beaten up by Lakha in a sweet moment of revenge, but his comeuppance—an individual act of violence—also feels feeble, particularly given the then-ongoing uprising of a whole people against their bourgeois overlords. The characters remain unchanged, save for a bandaged head and hangdog looks; a holiday in the village is no match for the stubborn existential accoutrements of class. One has the feeling that they, and we, have only encountered negative space—only the blinding light of day and the suffocating dark of night. Fittingly, a year later, Ray began The Adversary with a photonegative image of a funeral, the human figures glowing in the gray, X-ray-like screen. Dark gives way to light, and light to dark: now, the moment of change has arrived.

When I saw my first Carax film—Mauvais sang (1986), his second feature—I was young too. I was at the very beginning of my life as a writer, and after watching Mauvais sang, I immediately wanted to write. I was mesmerized by the iconic scene in which the film’s main character, Alex—in this trilogy of films, which also includes The Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Denis Lavant plays a character named Alex, though a different Alex each time—begins to move immediately upon hearing David Bowie’s “Modern Love.” Slowly at first, a cigarette in his mouth, holding his stomach, limping, then faster, abjectly almost, punching the air, dragging one leg after the other, jumping up to hit a wall and then turning in circles against it, hitting himself, running with his head forward and then back, faster now, running, running completely.

But I was equally taken in by Alex’s magic tricks and ventriloquism and by the moments in which we hear characters talk to each other in voice-over while we watch them do something else entirely, which is another kind of ventriloquism. Like Alex’s breakup with his young and impressionable lover, Lise, played by Julie Delpy. We hear him say goodbye to her in voice-over while she chases him. Their faces blur, almost into each other, the running sped up. “Lise, my little Lise, I’m leaving . . . I know, I’m a killer. I’m a killer, my warm gun left at the scene.” Later, we will watch Anna, played by Juliette Binoche, walk toward a phone we don’t hear ringing. She moves her lips, but we don’t hear her speak. I was enthralled as well by the slapstick choreography of the greeting between Marc and Charlie; the choreography of the fight between Alex and Marc, their faces pressed grotesquely against a glass window as they try to wrestle each other to the floor; the choreography of Alex stumbling drunk around a corner and down the street, holding onto the wall of a building, a toddler stumbling behind him. I loved the film in its entirety, but these were the moments that existed on a special plane for me, where a portal opens, and something fleeting—jagged or comic or uncanny or beautiful—comes into view.

The Seine, the radio, voyeurism, couples on the verge of breaking up or of forming, suicide, the thief/con man, Bowie songs, hitting oneself, movement and dance, Mireille Perrier and Juliette Binoche recur across this trilogy. And, of course, Denis Lavant. But perhaps more than anything else, what links these films is a sense of aesthetic experience, due, in part, to the extraordinary cinematography of Jean-Yves Escoffier, whom Carax worked with in each. Quite simply, the films are deeply pleasurable to watch, not only because they are visually appealing, but also because they are satisfyingly strange, a welcome discordance. The same is true for Carax’s later films, the dark and haunting Pola X (1999), the utterly original and genre-defying Holy Motors (2012), the enchanting and monstrous musical Annette (2021), even though each is from a very different era of filmmaking, made many years apart and with different preoccupations.

All of Carax’s films are rich in symbols, often mysterious. Sometimes we don’t know whether to read them as symbols at all; maybe they do exist as doorways to the subconscious mind, from Carax’s mind to ours. The face of the older man that the camera fades to in an early scene in Boy Meets Girl that just as quickly fades away. Is it Henri, the man who has just been left by Maïté? We don’t know. Later, a man’s voice whispers Alex’s name, waking him up. Who is he? The man who follows directly behind Bernard in another odd moment of choreography before Bernard descends into a subway station. The huge picture window in Mireille’s apartment in which she can see her neighbors and be seen in return, that at times makes it look as if she is sitting outside. A long monologue from Alex to Mireille that lapses into nonsense. It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense, because it brings into existence what I think is the film’s reality—silence, absurdity, the sublime.

Both Alex and Mireille have been rejected by their lovers, he by his girlfriend, Florence, and she by her boyfriend, Bernard. Alex finagles his way into a party where he knows he will see Mireille, following her into the kitchen, where they talk into the late hours. It is a film of the night, beginning with that child going to bed, while beyond, the Seine flows in the darkness. There is an obvious sense of aloneness in that first scene, and a deep aloneness and finality in the last scene of the movie. When Alex and Mireille are together at the party, it is a lovely period of suspension. They remain in the kitchen after everyone else has gone home. This is a film in which all the stakes are in the present moment. At one point Alex says to Mireille, “Sitting beside you this way is like eternity.” The viewer feels this too.

Boy Meets Girl is also a movie of youth, not as cutting as Carax’s later films, including The Lovers on the Bridge, yet by its final scene it will head in that direction. It is more like a dream of isolation, full of peculiar moments and unusual conversations. Not much happens, but it needn’t. It wasn’t a story that drove Carax to make this film, after all, but the creation of a world, as is true for all the films he makes. He has said that when he begins a new project, he tries to write a score, not a script, which offers us a clue to how music and narrative are intertwined in his films. He begins with something as simple as two feelings, or images, that he puts together to see if they will stick. From there, the story comes.

This second movie by Carax is equal parts science fiction, crime thriller, black comedy, love story, French New Wave, and film noir. The Alex of this film is older than the Alex of Boy Meets Girl, more experienced, harder, sometimes without emotion. After his father, Jean, throws himself onto the train tracks, Alex doesn’t bother to identify him at the morgue. We’re told several times that they’d “lost touch.” But now, Alex is stepping into his father’s shoes to help Marc and Hans steal a vial containing a new vaccine for the STBO virus, which a person catches if they have sex without love.

Mostly, though, Mauvais sang is surreal. Halley’s Comet is passing over the city, which makes Paris hot as an oven. When Anna attempts to cross the street, she burns her feet. Later, it will snow. But before that, after Alex’s botched attempt at stealing the vaccine, Lise will swoop in on the motorbike Alex has left her, speeding away from the crime scene with him on the back of the bike. There, they’ll have a telepathic conversation. What is it that makes this so moving—more so than if they were standing in front of each other, talking?

Suddenly, fireworks shoot into the sky and fall all around them, part of the celebrations for the bicentennial of the French Revolution. In the clamor, the two of them fire Michèle’s gun, Alex limping along the length of the bridge in that strange and hypnotic gait of his, Michèle shooting from the back of the bronze statue of Henri IV’s horse. When music begins playing, Michèle starts moving first, spinning around on the bridge, her arms outstretched, spinning faster when the music changes, throwing her arms crazily out into the air, Alex following her with bottles in his hands, shattering them on the ground, then kicking a stone post, until he and Michèle fall and run against each other, finally dancing some kind of waltz, Michèle shrieking with drunken ecstasy. Then comes the famous scene of Michèle water-skiing in the Seine, Alex pulling her along in a boat they stole for the occasion. Some critics have argued that this should have been the climax of the movie. Perhaps, but why shouldn’t an exhilarating scene like this exist in the middle, for its own sake, an experience unto itself, not simply for the sake of narrative? It changes what the space of the film will be. And it is, after all, when Alex and Michèle begin to fall in love, when they break through to each other. Why should the complexities of the film be smoothed over?

The next evening, Alex and Michèle lie in the green grass, blanketed by shadows. It is the first time in this trilogy that we see love expressed physically. Their love is imperfect, maybe even abusive on the part of Alex, but deep and real. Arm in arm, they walk through Paris to Bowie’s “Time Will Crawl.” When they pass a nightclub with ground-level windows shining out into the dark, Michèle drops to the sidewalk to look at the feet of the dancers, strobe lights flashing around them. What does looking mean to her here, now when she is losing her sight? She nods her head to the music, a faint smile on her face.

When Alex sees missing-person posters of Michèle in a subway station announcing a possible cure for her eye condition, he destroys them. When he discovers more of the posters in the back of a van, he sets them on fire, and when the van explodes, the man putting up the posters catches on fire too. Alex just stands there, watching. But he can’t in the end block Michèle from learning of this news, because it’s on the radio too. When she hears the missing-person message put out by her father, she’s in disbelief, stumbling and mumbling to herself. “A hope . . . The end of this nightmare . . . Just think, Alex.” For the second time, Alex just stands there. “My eyes!” Michèle yells. In that moment, she understands that Alex doesn’t want the best for her if it might take her away from him.

It was hardly an auspicious beginning, when the sixteen-year-old girl calling herself Jeanne la Pucelle arrived at the French court in February of 1429. Here was a young woman, a provincial illiterate in men’s clothes and with her hair cut short, who claimed to have been sent by God. While working in her garden in the village of Domrémy, she had received a series of ecstatic visions, all instructing her to drive out the English invaders and reunite the shattered kingdom of France under the Dauphin Charles, whom she would deliver personally to be coronated in the holy city of Reims. All the court had to do was hand the teenaged mystic command of the royal army, and turn her loose on the besieged city of Orléans.

That the young woman we now call Joan of Arc would achieve all this—and more—is the stuff of national and religious myth. Yet one wonders how, in the moment, this messenger and her convictions must have appeared to the people around her. Is it even possible to know the person behind the myth? This is the task that Jacques Rivette set for himself with Joan the Maid, his epic historical drama from 1994. The French New Wave legend had felt connected to Joan from his childhood in the ancient city of Rouen, where the saint and martyr was convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in 1431. Yet it was only after the international success of 1991’s Cannes Grand Prix–winning La belle noiseuse that the director could assemble the budget to make a proper film about her.

Divided into two parts, The Battles and The Trials, Rivette’s film tells Joan’s story from her first appearance in the walled town of Armagnac to her public execution at the age of nineteen—a three-year period that excludes both her formation and her holy visions. The Maid (art-house icon Sandrine Bonnaire) arrives in the film, then, as a figure of stubborn conviction, privy to a message and mission that we have not seen. When she demands to be taken to see the Dauphin, the authorities doubt her, and dismiss her outright. She spends the rest of The Battles proving herself to them and the whole of The Trials being punished for it.

Joan the Maid is a misty, mucky movie, set across a series of ravaged battlefields and in a number of real and rather drafty-looking castles. This is a France scraped bare by decades of war, a place of ruins and petty feuds with little space for the miraculous. The armor looks heavy, the clothing itchy, and the language spoken is intimate and familiar, with little of the high-flown pseudo-poetics one typically finds in period pieces. Rivette’s austere vision of the medieval past owes at least as much to Marketa Lazarová as to the many preexisting adaptations of Joan’s story. By my count it is the twelfth of at least sixteen films about the life of the teenaged saint, including versions starring Ingrid Bergman, Jean Seberg, and, well, Milla Jovovich. With its symphony of close-ups and tracking shots, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) transformed Renée Falconetti into the epitome of devotion and conscience, and made the Maid a fitting martyr for the coming century of show-trials. Robert Bresson, too, found in Joan a woman of pure principle, and staged her trial as a showdown between truth and equivocation, the certainty of faith vs. the exigencies of law. (The less said about Luc Besson’s catastrophic The Messenger, the better.)

Rivette gets there eventually. Yet he deploys his film’s substantial resources and 336-minute run time to allow us to see Joan as a person: a sincere young woman of both faith and calculation who could not help but affect the people around her. As Joan travels through history, Rivette intersperses the proceedings with testimony from various characters—soldiers, assistants, even the Maid’s own mother—who reflect on the time they spent with the holy woman. Their words, apparently drawn from the transcripts of her 1455–56 nullification trial, lend the film a curious documentary quality, as if we being invited to witness this nearly six-hundred-year-old story for the first time.

The aim is to overturn our expectations, to reconceive a famous story with the shock of the new. Thus we receive the familiar highlights—the cutting of Joan’s hair, the arrival at court, the lifting of the siege at Orléans, and her capture and conviction for heresy—yet they are embedded in what might often be described as a medieval hangout movie: call it Rio Loire. Rivette relays these scenes through sinuous long takes, carefully blocking his rooms full of courtiers and theologians like the faces one finds carved onto a wooden altar piece. Both battles and trials are largely elided, barring a bravura assault on the English army at Orléans, and Joan’s awful ascent to the stake. Instead, the Maid and her companions spar, tease, and quibble, and gradually their skepticism gives way to trust, and then to awe. By refusing us access to Joan’s visions, Rivette strips away her mythological status—and reveals her as a remarkably human figure, a girl whose presence and persistent faith could convince others to fight and die beside her, and who was made to suffer for this power.

Much of this feat comes down to Bonnaire’s astonishing performance. Previous Joans tended toward either the passionate or the steely, fixing the girl into the role of the useful symbol. Cast to embody what Rivette called Joan’s “popular side,” Bonnaire emphasizes the Maid’s conviction, which is not the same thing as certainty. Rather than ecstatic shouts or principled declarations, she speaks slowly, thoughtfully considering her words in light of both strategy and belief. Her Joan is unique among modern depictions of religious figures, for she neither preaches nor doubts; her faith is a matter of plain reality, as much the substance of her life as the devastation of the English invasion or the omnipresent threat of sexual violence. She consults her holy voices, but she cannot speak for them. She charges bravely into battle, but her wounds produce real pain, and she experiences real and overwhelming panic at the thought of her own death. Her ascent to the stake is lonely, dispirited, and despairing, and even the presence of the cross does not give her much relief.

Joan the Maid understands that Jeanne la Pucelle was not born to be channeled, or martyred, or made use of by clerical and national myths. Yet without these stories, without Joan’s transformation into a symbol, how would we know her today? In The Trials, Rivette stages a coronation ritual in the cathedral at Reims, an extensive sequence composed of gestures and formulations, all lavishly invested with royal and religious symbolism. It is Joan who has brought this about, yet she is oddly sidelined throughout the proceedings, and her standing at the French court begins to decline. Even her holy advisors have become murkier, their directions no longer so clear. She has gone from an actor to a vessel to a nuisance. Was she only ever a useful tool?

Here Rivette inserts a note of doubt into the heart of Joan’s hagiography. While bidding farewell to her spiritual advisor, the friar convinces Joan to put her signature on a condemnation of the followers of Czech cleric Jan Hus, a dissident theologian who was burned alive in 1415. Hus was a victim of politically motivated theology, and his fate both reflects and anticipates Joan’s own, illustrating how easily even those of sure and serious faith can find themselves coopted to serve the petty interests of the material world. Kings and cardinals, politicians and demagogues—up to the present day all have made use of the girl who, as Joan’s mother declares at the very beginning, was tried “without the shadow of the law, condemned in a damned and criminal way, and cruelly died by fire.”

A weaker film would make a polemic of this point, and drive itself into the ground. To his great and lasting credit, Rivette understood that it was just one piece of this story. By calling his film Joan the Maid, he emphasized not only her humble beginnings, but her essential humanity, the great contradiction of being that transcends all reductive symbology. To stake his epic duration and sizable budget—the film was “such a wreck from the point of view of production costs,” Rivette reflected in 1999—on such an intimate claim was a genuine risk. That it did not draw in audiences or pay off financially is not much of a surprise. Yet it is so rare for a film to invest the past with the same instability and uncertainty that we associate with life in the present. As with the Maid behind the myth, Joan does not deserve to be forgotten.

The portmanteau became increasingly popular in the 1940s on both sides of the Atlantic, with filmmakers using the structure to riff on a single motif or subject. The form gained a foothold in the United States with two films by Julien Duvivier: Tales of Manhattan (1942), punningly titled for the tailcoat that links the episodes as it changes hands, and Flesh and Fantasy (1943), where the stories are connected by their supernatural themes. Also released around the same time were Forever and a Day (1943), made by seven different directors to support the British war effort, and Dead of Night (1945), a suite of interlocking horror stories that remains one of the best anthology movies ever made.

In 1948, Gainsborough Pictures had a major hit with a portmanteau that took a slightly different approach, showcasing the world of a single acclaimed writer. Quartet strings together four short stories by W. Somerset Maugham, introduced by the author himself. Each segment had a different director, an idea that had worked well for Dead of Night. Instead of employing the earlier movie’s “frame” story, Quartet used screenwriter R. C. Sherriff for the whole movie, lending a subtler kind of unity. The cast was made up largely of beloved character actors like Basil Radford, Cyril Parker, and Hermione Baddeley, and up-and-comers including Mai Zettlerling and Dirk Bogarde.

For much of the twentieth century, Maugham was one of the most famous and best-selling fiction writers in the world. Born in 1874, he first achieved real fame in the early 1900s as a playwright. But it was the 1915 novel Of Human Bondage that made him a worldwide sensation. By the late ’40s, numerous Maugham works had been adapted into feature-length movies, including Of Human Bondage and other novels such as The Razor’s Edge and The Moon and Sixpence. Hollywood had also done well with multiple movies of two of his short stories: “Miss Thompson” (which became Rain on the stage, then on film) and “The Letter,” which also went from play to film. The prolific Maugham also published nine collections of short stories, from Orientations in 1898 to his last, Creatures of Circumstance, in 1947.

The idea for Quartet came from UK producer Antony Darnborough, who was eager to make British films that could be successful in the States. Maugham seemed ideal for this aim, since his books had always sold better with Americans than with his fellow Brits. And because Maugham’s stories—about a hundred in all—are widely seen as his best work, the focus on his short fiction made sense. Straightforwardly written, the tales feature odd, often two-faced or deceptive characters, and swift, engrossing plots. While few of Maugham’s stories end with a total switchback or O. Henry twist, they often close abruptly on one startling incident.

With Gainsborough head Sydney Box, Darnborough chose four stories for screenwriter Sherriff to adapt, looking for dramatic potential and choice roles that would tempt actors. Big-name players were not deterred by the relatively small size of the roles. As Ken Annakin (director of “The Colonel’s Lady” in Quartet, and “The Verger” and “Mr. Know-All” in Trio) told film scholar Brian McFarlane in 1992, “They all loved the idea of working on a Maugham story because he was recognized as one of the best storytellers of that era.”

Despite the lack of a frame story, there are connections among the Quartet segments, all four of which feature oblivious families, upended expectations, and the conflict between selfishness and love. “The Kite”—directed by Arthur Crabtree, who began as a cinematographer—is about a young man who finds himself torn between his mother, his wife, and his obsessive devotion to kite-flying. The opening section, “The Facts of Life,” tells the tale of a well-heeled father (Basil Radford) who sends his callow son Nicky (Jack Watling) to Monte Carlo, half expecting the kid to be swindled—and ends up chagrined when the boy returns happier and richer, not sadder and wiser. Though it’s the weakest segment of the four, there is charm in the casting. Director Ralph Smart makes sly use of Radford and Naunton Wayne—a.k.a. Charters and Caldicott, the comic team that began its career with Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes in 1938. And a young Mai Zetterling plays a glamorous con artist, a role that (in one of several instances of censorship-related alterations in the film) was changed from a sex worker in the original story.

The rest of Quartet abounds with standout performances. “The Alien Corn,” directed by self-professed “actor’s director” Harold French, features Dirk Bogarde doing some of the best work of his early career as a sensitive young man named George, a child of privilege hellbent on becoming a concert pianist. At the urging of his wily sweetheart (future Bond girl Honor Blackman), George strikes a bargain with his parents: he will go abroad and spend two years in training for his art, after which he will relinquish his dream if a pianist of note tells him he has no future as a professional. “The Colonel’s Lady” revolves around another aspiring artist—the wife (Nora Swinburne) of a Blimp-ish British colonel (Cecil Parker), who causes a stir when she publishes a collection of fiercely sensual poetry. The book becomes so popular that the colonel finds himself at his own club being told that his wife writes like Sappho. Annakin, the most visually dynamic of the Quartet directors, later said “The Colonel’s Lady” was “one of the best pictures I’ve ever directed,” and that he was especially pleased with the performances of Swinburne and Parker. The ending is more sentimental here than in Maugham’s original, again in line with the demands of the censors. But like the other segments, “The Colonel’s Lady” retains enough of the author’s characteristic sting and humor.

When Quartet was in production, Maugham was spending most of his time in the south of France. Darnborough persuaded the writer, well into his seventies and uneasy about his lifelong stammer, to travel to Pinewood Studios and film a prologue for the movie. The eager producer even duplicated Maugham’s French study, down to the worn patches on his favorite chair. Perhaps in response to this hospitality, Maugham seems visibly happy in the film. The sole trace of his stammer is a deep intake of breath here and there. One self-deprecating moment in his introduction became famous: “In my twenties, the critics said I was brutal. In my thirties, they said I was flippant; in my forties, they said I was cynical; in my fifties they said I was competent. And then, in my sixties, they said I was superficial.” In fact, while Maugham seldom complained in public, the dismissiveness of critics had stung, and the warm reception for Quartet pleased him a great deal. The British style of filmmaking brought out the essence of Maugham’s restless characters. With sympathy and wit, Quartet portrayed the problems that befall these people, and the problems they bring down on themselves.

Quartet’s rousing critical and commercial success made a sequel not just logical but inevitable. Trio was released two years later, with brief prologues that Maugham again shot at Pinewood, this time with him puffing heartily on a cigarette and walking around the duplicate office. Maugham introduces each story in just a sentence or two. Despite his overall pleasure in the success of Quartet, Maugham had politely disapproved of a couple of the new endings, notably the one for “The Colonel’s Lady.” As a form of redress, he shared in adapting the stories in Trio, along with Sherriff and Noel Langley. While promoting the film, Maugham told an American reporter, “There isn’t a single line of dialogue written by anyone but myself.” Any changes to the material were cleared by the author.

The best of Trio’s segments, “Sanatorium,” is its last and longest. The story could have supported a ninety-minute film, but at this length, poignant moments are never stretched out into mawkishness. The setting is a tuberculosis sanatorium in Scotland, presumably based on the one where Maugham himself spent months fighting off the disease in 1918. New patient Ashenden (Roland Culver) stands in for the author (as Maugham says in the prologue), and through him we meet patients who are there either to recover, to live out an existence too frail for anywhere else, or to die. The population of this little world is shown in pairs, including two elderly Scots who carry out a guerilla war of minor irritations against each other and a self-pitying patient who hates his wife for her good health. Ravishing Jean Simmons, barely in her twenties, plays Evie, who has spent most of her life in sanatoriums. She falls in love with George (Michael Rennie), a new arrival and barely reformed rake.

Director Harold French said he “particularly liked” making “Sanatorium,” but “I didn’t think I did it as well as I should have done. I should have been more honest about the disease than I was; I was concentrating on the romance too much. I should have made them more ill.” Viewing the film now, however, doesn’t support this assessment. Despite the beauty of the place—this nursing home could give Manderley a run for its money—there is always a sense of hovering death. One of the most haunting moments comes when Finlay Currie, as one of the squabbling Scots, tells Ashendean that he’s been there so long he can tell how long a patient has left as well as a doctor. And George, the man adds calmly, has at most two years.

Ready to test their luck with one more group of stories, the crew went to Maugham for Encore. The author’s prologues were shot at his house on Cap-Ferrat, the Villa La Mauresque. Maugham’s prologues still avoid details of plot, but here he offers broad hints as to interpretation and his own view of the characters. “The Ant and the Grasshopper” is perhaps the only story in the series of films that doesn’t work in any sense. The tale of two brothers, a worker and a sponger, features Nigel Patrick at his least engaging. If you’re watching in order, you may start to wonder if the series had already peaked.

Fortunately, the last two shorts are much better. “Winter Cruise,” Maugham tells us, was suggested by a woman he met on a voyage to the South Seas. Miss Reid (a superb Kay Walsh) is a good-natured spinster who likes to spend her winters sailing to and from the Caribbean on a regular working ship, as it’s cheaper and more practical than a cruise. Owing to a snafu, she is the only passenger on the ship's return trip. The officers are panic-stricken at the idea of having their peaceful male world invaded by her female chatter, and plot to escape her. Maugham was frequently accused of misogyny, but in this case, the charge doesn’t stick; Miss Reid knows herself better than anyone else suspects. The slightly noirish “Gigolo and Gigolette” plays out as a near-melodrama, its view of the importance of love to a woman set against a biting look at rich, jaded thrill-seekers. Circus performers Syd and Stella Cotman (Terence Morgan and Glynis Johns) have just one act: Stella’s dive from an eighty-five-foot tower into a five-foot-deep tank of burning water, which is exactly as terrifying as it sounds. When Stella loses her nerve, she begins to think her earnings are more important to her husband than she herself is.

Although Maugham’s stories would later become staples of television anthologies, Trio marked the end for this postwar big-screen trilogy, intended to show off the strengths of British filmmaking. And in many ways these movies did, highlighting the excellence of British acting and the intelligence of its adaptations. Quartet, Trio, and Encore remain well-loved by many to this day, though their multiple directors and emphatic literariness make them unlikely to gain much favor with the rock-ribbed auteurists of the world. Still, they have played an invaluable role in cementing the legacy of a writer who was at once a widely read and esteemed literary figure and a victim of the vagaries of critical reception. Just as notably, these films are shining examples of how, as Gore Vidal put it, “Maugham dominated movies when movies were the lingua franca of the world.”

Much of The Secret Agent unfolds over a few days during Carnaval, squarely in the midst of the military regime that governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Crucially, the word dictatorship is never once mentioned in the movie, not even in the opening titles, which situate us instead within “a period of great mischief.” This sly understatement points to the dominant mood and mode of Mendonça Filho’s film, and to its thematic concerns. The dictatorship was a time of violent repression, but it also produced multiple forms of resistance, daily work-arounds, coded language, an anarchic irreverence that could double as shield and weapon. How else to explain why the newspapers of Recife, the northeastern coastal city that is Mendonça Filho’s hometown, ran story after story in the midseventies about a disembodied “hairy leg” terrorizing the local population, pinning all manner of assaults—including what one can only assume were instances of state violence—on a zombie appendage?

Although grounded in period-specific details, The Secret Agent is interested less in the literal events of those anxious days than in what Mendonça Filho has called “the logic of that time,” shaped by daily realities but also by popular culture and urban legends—including the aforementioned hairy leg that here makes its first appearance in the belly of a shark. The film’s opening sequence crystallizes an atmosphere of absurdist dread. A man we first know as Marcelo (Wagner Moura) pulls up to a rural gas station in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, and immediately notices a corpse mere meters from the pump; its feet protrude from under a sheet of cardboard, and it is starting to smell, to judge by the swarming flies and marauding dogs. The pot-bellied attendant explains that the dead man was a would-be thief, dispatched by the attendant’s night-shift colleague. A police car pulls up on cue, but the officers—one of whom has a conspicuous bloodstain on his shirt—pay no attention to the body, and instead proceed to search Marcelo’s car and coerce a bribe, making do with the remainder of his pack of cigarettes.

The widowed Marcelo is returning to Recife to reunite with his nine-year-old son, Fernando (Enzo Nunes), who has been living with his maternal grandparents. Marcelo finds safe haven in an apartment complex where the chain-smoking septuagenarian spitfire Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) is harboring a motley group of displaced persons fleeing political or domestic strife (an exiled Angolan couple, a queer teenager estranged from his family, a single mother who takes a liking to Marcelo). His fixers help Marcelo secure a job at the local identification institute, where he digs through the files seeking information about his mother, or simply a record that she existed. But the matter of most pressing urgency—once it transpires that he is under a travel ban and a threat against his life is imminent—is to secure fake passports for himself and Fernando so that they can flee the country.

As in the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s, one of several genres that this splendidly polymorphous film evokes, the big picture remains, for much of the running time, out of view. “Marcelo” turns out to be an alias; our hero’s real name is Armando, and he used to be an academic. By the end of the movie, we understand the enraging circumstances that forced him into hiding and the tragic particulars of his family background. But it is a mark of Mendonça Filho’s confidence and generosity that he takes his time.

Although the magnetic Moura, with his watchful, layered performance, is the inarguable center of The Secret Agent, this is a richly populated ensemble film, full of indelible faces and personalities to match. “Elza is the most important character in the story now,” someone tells Armando, referring to a leader, played by Maria Fernanda Cândido, of the resistance network that is helping him. This assertion could be made many times over: almost anyone who enters the frame sparks immediate interest and becomes, for a moment, the movie’s focal point. A brazenly corrupt police chief (Robério Diógenes), perpetually flanked by his henchmen sons (Ítalo Martins and Igor de Araújo); an odd-couple assassin duo (Roney Villela and Gabriel Leone) and the dark-skinned laborer (Kaiony Venâncio) to whom they hand off the dirty work of murder; a gay German tailor, played by the singular Udo Kier in his final role, tagged by the bullying cops as an ex-Nazi but in fact a Holocaust survivor; the residents of Dona Sebastiana’s compound, who gather for an evening toast in one of the most moving scenes, a temporary community about to disperse to disparate fates. The overall effect, as Mendonça Filho moves from one situation to the next, is of a living, breathing story being fashioned in real time—and the construction of narratives turns out to be a central preoccupation of The Secret Agent.

Aside from the 1980-set prologue of his second feature, Aquarius (2016), this is Mendonça Filho’s first period piece, and he revels in the textures and details—the fashion, music, cars, and other trappings—of the late seventies, summoned as if from sense memories. (Born in 1968, he would have been Fernando’s age in 1977.) He also incorporates some of the era’s cinematic language, deploying split screens, wipe transitions, zooms, and split diopter shots that toy with depth of field. Shooting with vintage anamorphic lenses, Mendonça Filho and his cinematographer, Evgenia Alexandrova, opted for a brightly saturated palette to capture the sun-drenched vibrancy of Brazil during Carnaval. But about forty-five minutes in, a disorienting cut throws us into the present day—one immediate clue is a glimpse of an iPhone’s cold, flat hardness. This is the film’s boldest gambit, a flash-forward that reframes everything that precedes and follows. The flesh-and-blood people we have encountered are suddenly voices on tape, their accounts of persecution and resistance being transcribed by a couple of young researchers. Mendonça Filho returns us promptly to the Recife of February 1977, but we are now acutely aware that we are watching a fragment of history, one likely to have remained dormant had no one undertaken the work of remembering and preserving it.

The cassette tapes, part of a documentation project that Elza undertakes to counter misinformation and censorship, are totemic objects in The Secret Agent. They activate a form of time travel, embodying—as Mendonça Filho puts it—“the idea that there is somebody listening in the future.” One locus of that future is our here and now. Circulating between past and present, The Secret Agent is a rebuke to the historical amnesia and revisionism that has been a recent feature of Brazilian life, reaching its peak during former President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right populist regime. Outspoken critics of their country’s creeping authoritarianism, both Mendonça Filho and Moura were frequent targets of right-wing media during the Bolsonaro years, which saw a backsliding in Brazil’s troubled relationship with the crimes of the military regime. Forgetfulness was encouraged—as in Bolsonaro’s notorious remark that “those that look for bones are dogs”—and the brutal actions of the dictatorship justified and even celebrated.

It is significant that Armando, despite what the film’s title suggests, is not an enemy of the state but an ordinary citizen whose downfall begins when he crosses the wrong person. His plight owes to a pervasive confluence of corruption, cruelty, and impunity that is no less present today, in any number of authoritarian-leaning societies far beyond Brazil. Seen in flashback, Armando is a long-haired academic who heads his university’s engineering department. He plays host to Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), an executive from the then-state-owned utility company Eletrobras, who arrives dripping condescension for what he deems the provincial North and sets about defunding the research activities of Armando’s team. The scenes in which Armando and his wife, Fátima (Alice Carvalho), stand up to the sneering intimidation of Ghirotti and his goonish son bristle with the righteous anger that is an underremarked signature of Mendonça Filho’s. It makes sense that a body of work so attuned to the extreme divides of class and race in Brazilian society would find room for some memorably powerful explosions of fury: the cathartic uprising of the besieged townspeople in Bacurau (2019) and the stubborn crusade of Sônia Braga’s character against ruthless real-estate developers in Aquarius come to mind.

But the Mendonça Filho film that The Secret Agent most recalls—and that qualifies in fact as a companion piece—is 2023’s Pictures of Ghosts. A capacious essay about its maker’s actual and spiritual homes in Recife—the family apartment that served as a film set for his early endeavors, the movie palaces of the once vibrant downtown, where he cultivated his youthful cinephilia—that documentary also contains what we might take as The Secret Agent’s statement of purpose. Interviewed in a television clip, Mendonça Filho’s late mother, Joselice Jucá, a historian, describes oral history as the work of collecting information that has been “left out of history.”

Pictures of Ghosts and The Secret Agent go about that work assiduously, hopeful that what has been cast aside may yet be rediscovered and reclaimed. Both films remind us that cinema is itself an archive and a time machine. Marquees and posters double as timepieces. Fiction movies contain documentary traces of their day, and in an era when cinema was a popular art nonpareil, films could shape the dream life of a populace. Jaws, still playing in theaters over a year after its release, is a recurring specter in The Secret Agent: mirrored in the tabloid headlines about the shark that washed ashore with that human leg in its stomach, and an obsession of the young movie buff Fernando, who has not yet been granted permission to see it. The Cinema São Luiz, one of the venerable single-screen theaters that Mendonça Filho consecrates in Pictures of Ghosts, is a critical location in The Secret Agent. It is where Armando’s father-in-law, Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), works as a projectionist (the character is named for and modeled on an old friend of Mendonça Filho’s who makes a lasting impression in Pictures of Ghosts), and it is also where Elza records Armando’s testimony for posterity.

A film of continual surprise, The Secret Agent keeps things off balance through its extraordinary final passages. It is here that we fully grasp that Mendonça Filho’s narrative and formal choices are inseparable from his ethical and political considerations. As Carnaval heats up, the walls close in on Armando. Most other movies would have positioned his doom as the narrative’s tragic climax, but Mendonça Filho handles it with astonishing understatement. Armando’s killing takes place offscreen: an act of mercy and a principled refusal of spectacle, but also a gut punch in its brute finality. Flávia (Laura Lufési), one of the students listening to Elza’s tapes in the present, learns what happened to Armando from a newspaper scan: the item includes the false charge of corruption that dogged him after his entanglement with Ghirotti, and a blurred photo of his body in the street. Time turns lives into footnotes, if it does not erase them completely. Our hero is but one of countless pointless casualties of the dictatorship and its miasma of depravity.

Mendonça Filho concludes the film in our unsteady present. Echoing the fate of Armando’s engineering lab decades earlier, the university pulls the plug on Flávia’s research project, wary of sensitive information coming to light. Unable to shake Armando’s story, she seeks out his son, the now middle-aged Fernando, who works as a doctor at a blood bank in Recife. (Moura, with cropped hair, also plays this role.) There is an important revelation in their exchange; Fernando shares what little he knows about Armando: that he was the product of a liaison between a seventeen-year-old boy and the fourteen-year-old daughter of his family’s Indigenous housekeeper, and that he had little contact with his mother. Fernando, with visible discomfort, describes the grandmother he never knew as “an enslaved person.” Accordingly, there was no trace of her in the registry office when the adult Armando went looking. Mendonça Filho has never shied from examining the persistent scars of his country’s colonial past—this was already evident in his first feature, Neighboring Sounds (2012), which acknowledged Recife’s history as a city built on sugar plantations and slave labor. The dictatorship, as the potent coda of The Secret Agent makes clear, is hardly Brazil’s only unresolved trauma.

The analog tapes that are records of Armando’s existence—that prove he lived—are back in the possession of those who would prefer to suppress their contents, but Flávia has copied them onto a flash drive for Fernando. He barely remembers his father and doesn’t seem keen to delve into the past, but he accepts her gift. As the film ends, the drive sits in the pocket of Fernando’s lab coat, a latent archive that awaits, perhaps, a listener in the future.

Certainly, Linklater’s wide-ranging experience, creative curiosity, high-quality filmography, and consistent concern with the promise of youth made him a uniquely apt fit for this material. It also likely helped him bypass any French resistance to an outsider dealing with the country’s cultural legacy. But another easing factor must have been that so much of the discourse within the cinephile community—particularly around the auteur theory, devised by Cahiers gurus André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc and championed in the U.S. by critic Andrew Sarris—has always been a Franco-American love affair, and Nouvelle Vague is a superb continuance of that.

The binational romance between France and the U.S. is, of course, central to the original film, in its match between an American girl in Paris, Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), and a young French hoodlum, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), as well as in the keen admiration for American cinema shared by the Cahiers directors—all playing supporting roles in Linklater’s film. Another such romance is central to what is probably Linklater’s best-known work, The Before Trilogy, about the enduring romance between the American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and the French Céline (Julie Delpy), the second installment of which, Before Sunset (2004), takes place in Paris. Nouvelle Vague calls upon all of these resonances.

When we meet the first of the French critic-filmmakers in Nouvelle Vague, however—Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), and Claude Chabrol (Antoine Besson), alongside their key script collaborator Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest)—they’re in a screening of The Devil’s Pass, a quasi-ethnographic tale, produced by their friend Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyfürst), about a young Afghan boy trying to reach Kabul for a horseback-riding competition. We see their faces lit up by the screen in the dark, but all we experience of that film is a snatch of voice-over commentary: “The great Asian dust covers the past and shrouds the future.” I take this as a key to how Linklater and scriptwriters Holly Gent and Vince Palmo decided to treat the creation of Breathless, restricting themselves to an exclusive slice of time, from the film’s first possibilities of being made to its final shot, with no early historicist contextualizing nor any flagrant presaging of the eventual fates of its participants.

For instance, when Juliette Gréco (Alix Bénézech) appears at the drinks party after the screening and we see Godard compliment her rather clumsily and get the brush-off, if you don’t know who Gréco is—a figure with so much of the mythology of postwar Paris about her (chanteuse, friend of the existentialists, in a relationship with Miles Davis, etc.)—you must take her as depicted, simply as a famous actress who doesn’t get cast in Breathless. Rather than constantly explaining the culture of Paris 1959, Nouvelle Vague is steeped in it. Real-life character after real-life character is introduced in this way, with a lingering, captioned portrait or group shot, visual likenesses being of huge importance for both the plausible belief of the preinformed and the curiosity of the unacquainted.

What better way to avoid weighing your film down with cultural baggage than by plunging viewers into the story in medias res and having them find a visual exactitude that so fully and beguilingly brings a vanished moment back to cinematic life? I’ll come to the look of Nouvelle Vague shortly, but in terms of resemblances, Linklater’s most important achievement here is to have assembled a young French cast (Zoey Deutch as Seberg being the American exception) that so vividly evokes the key figures of a near-mythical time and place. Marbeck in particular, wearing Godard’s trademark shades, even in the dark, and his practiced, hard-to-impress deadpan, is a marvel as the pushy, sometimes funny, often annoying, devastatingly dry iconoclast, whose first gambit with Beauregard—whom he wants to produce his own first feature—is to tell him that The Devil’s Pass is “a piece of shit.”

Marbeck necessarily dominates Nouvelle Vague, at least until the shoot begins, playing up the duplicitous rogue, a character perhaps not too dissimilar to the casual criminal at the center of Breathless, but one bursting with rule-breaking ideas about filmmaking that he needs to try out, being the last of the New Wave critics—after Chabrol, Truffaut, Eric Rohmer (Côme Thieulin), and Jacques Rivette (Jonas Marmy)—to make a feature. We soon come to admire his audacity and cheek. He is fortunate to have the immediate, instinctive backing of his friend Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), with whom he had made the short film Charlotte et son Jules.

When Godard first shows a picture of Seberg to Beauregard, and Beau-Beau (his nickname) says, “We’ll never get her,” it’s the first indication that Otto Preminger is an invisible influence on Godard and his film. Preminger, who directed several noirs in the forties, discovered Seberg in Marshalltown, Iowa, via a talent search for a teenager to play Joan of Arc in Saint Joan (1957). He followed that bet on an unknown ingenue by immediately casting her again as the lead in Bonjour Tristesse (1958). In the first of many moments in Nouvelle Vague where Godard is cajoling Seberg into her role, he tells her that Patricia Franchini is a continuance of the teenager she played in the latter film. Deutch portrays Seberg as a sophisticated survivor of bullying, someone who has learned to roll with the metaphorical punches and give as good back. She tells Godard that Preminger was a sadist. When Godard denies her the surety of a script, she continues to dangle the possibility of pulling out of the film. Their fragile to-ing and fro-ing remains a key tension throughout the daily process of shooting.

But Nouvelle Vague is not just a portrait of Godard and Seberg’s struggles to collaborate; it’s also a snapshot of the culture of New Wave critics turned directors. If Preminger is a visually absent influence, Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) is a present one. Rossellini comes to give a speech to the Cahiers crowd not long before Godard begins his shoot, telling them to seek the truth, that the camera is “a ballpoint pen, an imbecile.” He elaborates further to Godard, who gives him a lift to his hotel, extolling many of the ideas—“shoot quickly; interrupt shooting when inspiration flags”—that Godard will employ and that drive Beau-Beau to distraction. Just before Godard’s first day of filming, after a screening of Frank Tashlin’s Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Truffaut bombards him with playful, impossible advice: “Think of Rossellini. Be fast like him. Be witty like Sacha Guitry, musical like Orson Welles, simple like Marcel Pagnol. Be wounded like Nicholas Ray, effective like Hitchcock, profound like Bergman, and insolent like no one else.” Chabrol and Rohmer join in, and then Schiffman delivers the punch line: “Just don’t fuck it up.” It’s a wonderfully alarming snapshot of the pressures on a first-time director of such ambition.

As the shoot kicks off, and Godard keeps everyone on the back foot, the filmmaking advice, literary quotations, and philosophical musings pile up (much as they continue to do in Godard’s later films). This is how the more general cultural idea of Paris in the late fifties makes its presence felt. Godard does all his writing in cafés, just as the existentialist-philosopher pair Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre famously did, and conducts his script meetings with Truffaut in the Richelieu-Drouot subway station. At Godard’s bidding, first assistant director Pierre Rissient (Benjamin Clery) quotes Sartre as a way of launching the production, and later, Godard supplies Seberg with a line that might have been lifted out of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: “Am I unhappy because I am not free, or not free because I am unhappy?”

Paradoxes abound, but the one at the heart of Nouvelle Vague is that, in celebrating and eulogizing Godard’s off-the-cuff, improvisatory approach, Linklater himself mostly did the opposite. As he explained in a Lincoln Center interview, he and his young cast and crew did much careful preparation and rehearsal before they began the shoot. And it is easy to surmise that the very reason the film is so charmingly convincing, and so plausible a re-creation of a film being made up as it goes along, is precisely because of that thorough prep. The script relishes gossip and film lore and is full of succinct humor. There’s a lot of goofing off and mutual teasing on set. Much of the fun revolves around the technology that Godard put to use, in particular the postman’s cart adapted to hide cinematographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat) for the famous street scene where Patricia is selling the New York Herald Tribune, and the fact that they’re using the actual Éclair Cameflex CM3 camera that the real Coutard wielded, which was so noisy that all the dialogue in Breathless had to be dubbed in afterward. Linklater’s own stricture on his cinematographer, David Chambille, was that they should only employ shots that were possible in 1959, in monochrome and at the same 1.37:1 aspect ratio as Breathless. This, too, makes the period re-creation feel all the more accessible, following, as it does, Rossellini’s dictum that the best way of filming is the simplest. Black and white also made it easier for Linklater to incorporate period shots of Paris and Cannes to help achieve verisimilitude.

Chambille’s work here is a treat, comparable to other great monochrome period-reconstruction dramas, not least Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), the film that Linklater has said put him on the road to filmmaking. Gorgeous black-and-white images combined with a jazz soundtrack act like a mnemonic to allow the late-fifties/early-sixties period to manifest itself and say, “This was a cool time to be young.” Seberg’s nocturnal, clothed dip in a public fountain is like a more modest variation on Anita Ekberg’s Trevi Fountain display in Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1960). In their growing amiable flirtation, dancing in sync to the Olympics’ “(Baby) Hully Gully,” Seberg/Deutch and Belmondo/Dullin anticipate the famous Madison dance scene that will be in Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964). In a couple of scenes, there is just the slightest hint that Seberg’s marriage to wannabe filmmaker François Moreuil (Paolo Luka-Noé), whose arrival at the end of each day is like a proverbial wet blanket, will not endure (Seberg would file for divorce in 1960).

“Good thing the camera really loves these two,” says Coutard of Seberg and Belmondo toward the end of filming Breathless, knowing, as he must have, how precarious what he’d shot might seem, and not able to anticipate how effective Godard’s famous use of the jump cut would be. But since postproduction falls mostly outside the parameters of Nouvelle Vague, we must leave speculations about the editing room behind.

Godard later said of Breathless, in relation to Preminger’s noir Fallen Angel (1945), that “the characters played by Belmondo and Dana Andrews are somewhat alike. They’re people who . . . must have represented for me at the time a certain ideal of freedom, meaning doing whatever you want.” Linklater portrays Godard exactly like this, as someone striving to do things his way against all odds, yet with the distinction of having allies in the fellowship of cinephiles. The fact that Linklater has pulled off so many hugely ambitious films himself—the twelve-year production of Boyhood (2014), for instance, or the eighteen-year span of The Before Trilogy, from Before Sunrise (1995) to Before Midnight (2013), with Sunset in between—makes his keen sympathy with Godard’s plight all the more convincing. With Nouvelle Vague, the “making of” film becomes a rich feature event all its own (as it did for Godard in 1963’s Contempt and 1982’s Passion), and it’s terrific to see so much venerated cinephile history handled with such grace and wit by a director who has found a whole new tribe of French actors whom the camera also loves.

Hideaki Anno wrote these words in 1993, just two years before he would definitively disprove them with the creation of his magnum opus, Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–6). His pessimism was not without cause: the anime industry was in a slump, even before the bursting of Japan’s “bubble economy” in 1992 lead to major contractions. In particular, the science-fiction and mecha (a.k.a. “giant robot”) genres that had forged Anno’s own fandom, and on which he’d cut his professional teeth, had mostly disappeared from the airwaves and migrated to the home-video market. Anno and his studio Gainax had broken it big there with his first directorial project, the 1988 miniseries Gunbuster—an eccentric mash-up of giant robots, sports anime, hard sci-fi, and the then-recent Tom Cruise blockbuster Top Gun—but had hit much harder resistance on television. His first TV series, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990–1), suffered an arduous production, and left Gainax with major financial losses. Anno found himself emotionally in step with the medium he loved—which is to say, he spent the early nineties in a period of severe depression.

Produced in the wake of this personal and professional malaise, Evangelion proved both an emotional exorcism and a huge commercial paradigm shift. Its twenty-six-episode run sparked a new boom in anime production, fandom, storytelling, and merchandising that carried into the twenty-first century. It popularized the late-night anime block—where shows were broadcast in inexpensive time slots late at night or in early morning hours, creating a haven for more experimental and adult-oriented series—while further intensifying the already-hot home video market. And that was all before Evangelion left Japan: the series was also a crucial leader in establishing a durably popular anime market in the United States and other English-speaking territories. In the nineties, anime in America largely existed either as an underground, bootlegged subculture or through dubbed “cartoons” on TV edited to disguise their “foreign” nature. Evangelion’s release on both dubbed and subtitled VHS, beginning only months after the end of the Japanese broadcast and without content edits, refused this binary, and its popularity proselytized anime to a new generation of fans. (This dub, beloved by English-speaking fans but out of circulation since a new version was recorded in 2019, is the option presented on the Criterion Channel, alongside the original Japanese, restoring official access to an important piece of anime history).

In the case of a more sober and conventional series, this is the point at which I would introduce the plot. I would describe the then-future setting of 2015, fifteen years after a cataclysm known as the “second impact” decimated human civilization; and I would explain how and why the race of giant, Lovecraftian monsters known as Angels can only be stopped by the intervention of biomechanical mechas called Evangelions, which must be piloted by emotionally unstable teenagers speed-running their way through every psychological roadblock known to Freudian psychoanalysis. But the plot, lore, and logic of Evangelion is a Pandora’s box even Evangelion itself is hesitant to fully unseal, especially in its increasingly experimental second half, which ultimately jettisons narrative coherence in favor of thematic resolution. To experience Evangelion is to be confused by Evangelion, and to be confused by Evangelion is part of the pleasure of Evangelion.

One will quickly realize that what matters most are the minds and hearts of its vivid, complicated characters, principally the teenage protagonist Shinji Ikari, a vessel for Anno’s own depression, self-loathing, and indecision. While the opening episodes—in which Shinji is pressured to pilot the eponymous Evangelion at the behest of his simultaneously domineering and absentee father, Gendo—are full of bombast and spectacle, Evangelion declares its true intentions in its fourth episode. This half-hour features no robots, no monsters, no action or external threat of any kind, instead offering a startlingly intimate portrait of depression as Shinji withdraws into himself while receding further and further from civilization. Although the series excels in sequences of kinetic action, it here establishes its equally potent penchant for slowness, for compositions filled with negative space, and for confrontationally long takes—in sum, a devotion to sitting with emotional discomfort, and using the hollow stillness of an exterior landscape to express the desolation of a person’s interiority.

Indeed, the true artistic legacy of Neon Genesis Evangelion isn’t as a feat of world-building or narrative, but as the work that fully inaugurates anime’s postmodern moment of looking inward. Inward to anime’s own history, own subcultures, and own aesthetics; inward to the material essence of animation itself, as Evangelion’s later episodes and feature-film follow-ups play with rough sketches, unfinished animation, and other preproduction material, using such imagery as an expressive metaphor for escaping from narcissistic self-withdrawal and developing a healthy ego; and inward, most of all, because the series identifies its core battlefield not as the land upon which the monsters and robots fight, but the space within the mind of its emotionally insulated protagonist, which by the end of the television series comes to wholly overtake the external diegesis.

The series’ creators were all dyed-in-the-wool anime fans whose influences and tastes were forged not only by the shows they grew up on, but by the well-developed fan culture surrounding the industry. Among their key touchstones was Mobile Suit Gundam (1979–80), which had shifted the course of mecha anime with its focus on in-depth character psychology, scientific plausibility, and detailed world building. Shinji himself is a clear descendent of Gundam’s protagonist Amuro Ray, moodier and more introverted than the nekketsu “hot-blooded” young boy character type found in earlier “super robot” anime.

Here, Anno identified a place where his own depressive tendencies and thematic interests mapped onto a durable archetype. But if other boys had refused to “get in the robot” before Shinji Ikari, few did so with the sheer degree of despondency and diffidence as he, and few works prioritized that study of depression and interiority above all else. The innovation of Evangelion lay not in rejecting or deconstructing the last fifteen years of anime, but in refining and pushing these ideas even further. In Japan, the series is known as the progenitor of the sekai-kei (“world type”) anime, stories in which the personal crisis of an individual or romantic pair is mirrored in an apocalyptic danger of global proportions. If you’ve ever seen a film by Makoto Shinkai—Your Name, Weathering with You, and Suzume are among the most popular animated films of the twenty-first century—you’ve seen a sekai-kei narrative, one marked by the influence of Evangelion’s emotionally maximalist storytelling.

Evangelion should also be understood as a descendent of the live-action tokusatsu series—special effects–driven sci-fi/fantasy shows depicting mankind’s battles with giant kaiju invaders—that emerged in the 1960s. Anno is particularly indebted to Tsuburaya Productions’ Ultraman, from which Evangelion inherits three fundamental characteristics: First is the series’ setup, in which a secretive UN-chartered organization, usually boasting a three or four-letter name, leads the fight against giant monsters (the original Ultraman has the SSSP, while Evangelion has NERV). Second is its copious Christian imagery. Creator Eiji Tsuburaya’s devout Catholicism made this a fixture of Ultraman, where the eponymous hero—a being from the “Land of Light” who walks among humanity by taking the form of a man—is an obvious Christ allegory. Anno doesn’t deploy spiritual iconography to such theologically coherent ends, instead mixing crosses, stigmata, and spears with other pieces of Judeo-Christian mysticism (the Dead Sea Scrolls) and Japanese Shinto cosmology (the vision of a “primordial cosmos”) to create a mythology that is highly evocative without cleanly mapping onto real-world faith traditions. Third is the extreme visual style pioneered by Ultraman’s greatest director, Akio Jissoji, whose episodes are filled to the brim with shots of such conceptual and practical complexity that each would be the standout image in any other production. His contributions to Ultraman (1966–7) and Ultraseven (1967–8) are the greatest formal influence on Anno’s style from Evangelion to the present day, obvious whenever characters are framed through a prism, reflected in a mirror or pair of sunglasses, or accompanied by compositions from the canon of classical music. These influences run so deep that, when interviewed for this year’s The Origin of Ultraman documentary, Anno stated, with an air of artistic resignation, that “the curse of Ultraman will last until I die.”

As this rich mélange of influences attests, Evangelion was a product of true otaku, the Japanese word for hardcore fans of anime and related pop culture (and which, in Japan, carries a much more ambivalent connotation than its more neutrally descriptive English usage, thanks to high-profile cases of violence, withdrawal, and other antisocial behavior in the eighties and nineties associated in the public consciousness with anime fandom). Anno’s professional life was intertwined with his fandom from the very beginning. Although accepted to the prestigious Osaka University of Arts, he was expelled after three years. Instead of attending classes or paying tuition, he’d been making connections with other anime fans turned artists, who banded together to create a pair of short films for the Daicon III and IV sci-fi conventions in 1981 and 1983. Gleeful mash-ups of copyrighted characters and songs animated with a delirious sense of style, these shorts got Anno and company’s foot in the door in the industry and led to the formation of Gainax in 1984 (the same year Hayao Miyazaki’s epochal Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released, itself featuring animation by Anno). The artists who would serve as Evangelion’s creative leads assembled at Gainax over the next few years, including assistant directors Kazuya Tsurumaki and Masayuki, character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, mechanical designer Ikuto Yamashita, cowriter and storyboard contributor Shinji Higuchi, and composer Shiro Sagisu. All were born within less than a decade of one another, and were in their late twenties to midthirties at the time of Evangelion’s production, placing them at the forefront of a new creative generation: one that had never known a time before mecha anime, tokusatsu shows, or the fan cultures they inspired.

Yet as was often the case at Gainax, budgetary mismanagement and creative indecision plagued the production down the home stretch. The final two episodes of Evangelion are infamous, as they fully abandon all narrative momentum and giant-robot action in favor of a decidedly avant-garde approach attending squarely to Shinji’s bruised psyche. Closer to the latter-day essay films of Jean-Luc Godard than any other mecha anime half-hours, these episodes depict a dense, verbally aggressive, but visually ascetic Socratic dialogue with the self, a sort of personal interrogation illustrated through a combination of reused footage, sparse and simple new animation, on-screen text, and unfinished drawings and production materials. Although they provide a thoughtful and powerful thematic closure to the ideas undergirding the series, their near-total abandonment of the show’s plot, mythology, and exterior stakes understandably baffled and upset contemporary fans, leading to calls for a do-over. The series’ immense commercial success enabled Anno and Gainax to do just that, in the form of two feature films.

The first, Evangelion Death (True)², is a compilation film re-editing the first twenty-four episodes of the TV series. Although relatively unfamiliar to American audiences, compilation films have been a common practice in Japanese cinema for decades. They provide an opportunity for fans to catch up on the story while seeing their favorite scenes play out on the big screen, and give animators a chance to touch up or replace certain shots, or even create all-new scenes that weren’t a part of the TV broadcast. Death (True)² fulfills each of these functions, but is also unusually bold in style and rigorous in structure for this kind of film. Presented not as a chronological plot recap but a series of thematic movements, the film is structured around the motif of Shinji and the other Evangelion pilots rehearsing in a string quartet for a performance of Pachelbel’s Canon, with aggressive, free-associative editing layering events from across the series on top of one another, accompanied by quick, staccato text inserts, often of just a few frames. The result is a dynamic and provocative viewing experience worth the time of even those who know the series by heart.

This film was first released to theaters in March 1997 as part of Neon Genesis Evangelion: Death & Rebirth, where it was followed by twenty-five minutes of all-new animation—announced, at the end of the presentation, as an extended preview of the second film, Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion. Released in full that July, this ninety-minute feature presents an alternate version of the series’ last two episodes. Where the original ending was sparse, still, highly interior, and ultimately quite optimistic in its vision of Shinji’s emotional rehabilitation, the version found in The End of Evangelion is almost the exact opposite: a spectacular, bombastic kaleidoscope of violence and kineticism, its animation overwhelming in scale and speed, its tone bleak and its imagery grotesque. Different as they are, these two disparate endings are connected by their penchant for avant-garde experimentation, with the feature’s rapid frame-by-frame edits recalling the experimental animations of Stan Brakhage, and a live-action interlude musing on the nature of anime fandom playing once again in the essayistic tone of Godard or Chris Marker. Both versions also share a common thematic arc, in which the “end of Evangelion” means rejecting Evangelion as a tripartite signifier: the in-universe mechs, the series and story they exist within, and the insular world of anime fandom itself. As indelibly touched by fandom as the series is, Evangelion ultimately reflects the ambivalence the word otaku occupies in Japanese culture, making the series both a product of and manifesto against the insularity of fandom.

That said, this would not, in fact, be the end of Evangelion, as Anno and much of the original crew revisited their seminal work with the four-part Rebuild of Evangelion film series from 2007 to 2021. Far more than a straightforward remake, these features begin from a shared narrative foundation with the TV series before striking out in an entirely different direction, providing the creators a chance to reflect on a story born from youthful passion with the prudence and insight of age and experience. They are among the great achievements of global animation in the twenty-first century.

But whichever the telling, Evangelion in all its forms is a work worth watching for the strong reactions it prompts. Love it, hate it, or simply walk away baffled, one will be marked by the encounter. I myself confess to having a tenuously passionate relationship to the original series and The End of Evangelion, vacillating between intense identification with its raw, deeply felt depiction of depression, awe at the most daring and virtuosic stretches of animation and direction, and feeling some alienation toward the show’s “fan service” imagery and generally schizophrenic depiction of women. But I love the Rebuild tetralogy profoundly, and that love only exists in the context of the broader conversation with the original work those films both practice and encourage. Whether one is a seasoned anime veteran or a relative newcomer to the world of Japanese animation, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a must-watch: a series worth experiencing and grappling with, in no small part for what it may teach you about yourself. Despite Anno’s anxieties of the early nineties, animation is far from over, and Evangelion is an exemplar of the relentless passion, innovation, and never-ending dialogue between creator and audience that has kept anime alive and at the forefront of global pop culture for so many years.

Thanks to Sean Chapman for the translation at the top of this piece.

This October, hitch a ride to the heart of terror: our Halloween programming includes a full-throttle tour of cinema’s scariest road movies, an anthology of TV-movie nightmares, and collections built around our fears of sinister intruders and mysterious possessive forces. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including the films of contemporary Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Marc Maron’s Adventures in Moviegoing, selections from the landmark box set The Complete Kubrick, transgressive cult favorites from Bruce LaBruce, and the riveting anime series Terror in Resonance.

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.

Terror takes the fast lane in these souped-up joyrides into fear. While the road movie typically imagines the open highway as a conduit for freedom and self-discovery, these films explore the genre’s dark underside, where a wrong turn, a chance encounter along a desolate byway, or a serious case of road rage plunges travelers into a desperate fight for survival. From pedal-to-the-metal tales of crazed killers behind the wheel (Duel, The Hitcher) to terrifying detours into the hostile wilderness (Alone) to careening journeys into the occult and supernatural (Race with the Devil, The Appointment), these nightmares on wheels turn the open road into a freeway to hell.

Programmed by Clyde Folley

FEATURING: And Soon the Darkness (1970), Duel (1971),* The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Race with the Devil (1975), Road Games (1981), The Appointment (1982), The Hitcher (1986),* Maximum Overdrive (1986), The Wraith (1986), The Vanishing (1988), Cohen and Tate (1989), Highway to Hell (1991), Dust Devil (1992),* Joy Ride (2001), Alone (2020)*

The small screen delivers big shocks in these horror gems from the golden age of the American television movie. Both a proving ground for up-and-coming talent and a haven for Hollywood veterans, the TV movie gave viewers the chance to see a new feature-length film in the comfort of their home nearly every week, with horror and thriller films making a particular impact. From genre touchstones like Steven Spielberg’s high-octane directorial debut, Duel, and Tobe Hooper’s atmospheric Stephen King adaptation Salem’s Lot to ripe-for-discovery cult favorites like the indelibly creepy slasher Dark Night of the Scarecrow, these exemplars of taught, economical filmmaking deliver maximum thrills.

FEATURING: Duel (1971),* Someone’s Watching Me! (1978), Salem’s Lot (1979), Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981)

The sanctuary of the home becomes a terrifying trap in these disturbing tales of sinister, unannounced guests who arrive at the door with shocking consequences. Whether the menace comes from the satanists next door in Rosemary’s Baby, the gang of masked home invaders who interrupt a family reunion in You’re Next, or the seemingly innocuous acquaintance who turns up and refuses to leave in The Gift, these domestic nightmares invite us to consider a most unsettling question: How do we react when the horror is already inside the house?

FEATURING: The Night of the Hunter (1955), Rosemary’s Baby (1968),* Play Misty for Me (1971),* Homebodies (1974), The Plumber (1979), Pacific Heights (1990), When a Stranger Calls Back (1993),* La cérémonie (1995), Funny Games (1997), You’re Next (2011), The Gift (2015)*

On his recently retired podcast WTF with Marc Maron, the fearlessly unfiltered comedian and cultural commentator often used his platform to delve into the creative lives and processes of some of contemporary cinema’s most vital filmmakers. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, he joins The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey for a typically probing discussion of his own relationship to cinema, from childhood exposures to highly age-inappropriate films to his obsession with silent-movie stars to his evolving relationship with the French New Wave. The films he has selected include art-house touchstones by Michelangelo Antonioni (Red Desert), John Cassavetes (A Woman Under the Influence), and Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Veronika Voss), auteurs whose films he views as puzzles that continue to inspire questions and fascination even after multiple viewings.

FEATURING: Shoot the Piano Player (1960), Red Desert (1964), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The American Friend (1977), Veronika Voss (1982)

These boundary-pushing visions of total takeover examine the terror and transgressive thrill of losing oneself to a host of uncanny forces. Ancient demons (The Omen), AI gone rogue (Demon Seed), alien parasites (Lifeforce), and adolescent bloodlust (Jennifer’s Body) turn the body into a battleground in tales of physical and psychic invasion that explore the primal anxieties and provocative possibilities of transformation from within.

FEATURING: Itim (1976), The Omen (1976), Demon Seed (1977), Possession (1981), The Entity (1982), Lifeforce (1985), The Faculty (1998),* Jennifer’s Body (2009), The Wailing (2016)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

A casual caper, a tribute to a vanishing industrial Italy, a scruffy intergenerational odyssey, and a free-flowing bender through time and space: this amiably ambling, booze-soaked road movie follows Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) and Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla), two small-time Italian crooks confronting a lifetime of failure as they face middle age. The return of an exiled partner in crime affords a second chance for long-lost riches—but can they put down their beers long enough to keep their eyes on the prize? Along their slow-motion, alcoholic grand tour of the Venetian countryside, they cross paths with Giulio (Filippo Scotti), a shy, heartsick architecture student who reluctantly warms to the sodden pair. Beautifully shot on 16 mm film and soundtracked by a wistful blues-rock score, The Last One for the Road captures the wonderfully woozy wobble of a life lived moment to moment and drink to drink.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Groundbreaking when it was made and still fiercely original today, this trans and butch buddy film chronicles three weeks in the life of Shy (Silas Howard), a handsome, gender-bending small-town dreamer with a nagging messiah complex. Reeling from his father’s death, Shy heads to the big city to sink himself into a “life of crime.” He is quickly distracted by Valentine (Harry Dodge), a deliriously expressive wiseacre on a misguided search for his birth mother. The two misfit grifters join forces and learn the true meaning of “poise under pressure” in this endearingly lo-fi, antiauthoritarian tale of friendship, trust, and redemption.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Celebrate the October release of Criterion’s monumental box set The Complete Kubrick with three masterworks by the auteur who opened up popular cinema to new realms of moral profundity and metaphysical mystery. With Lolita, Kubrick turned Vladimir Nabokov’s scandalous bestseller into a surreally absurdist satire of self-delusion; with Barry Lyndon, he took the historical epic to new heights of painterly visual majesty; and with his final film, the psychosexual riddle Eyes Wide Shut, he brought twentieth-century cinema to a tantalizing, hypnotic close.

FEATURING: Lolita (1962), Barry Lyndon (1975), Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

On her remote country estate, a mother (Nicole Kidman) keeps her light-sensitive children enshrouded in darkness and isolation, until unwelcome intruders begin to haunt her insular world.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Alejandro Amenábar, a  conversation between Amenábar and film critic Pau Gómez, making-of programs, and more.

A couple experience tragedy and supernatural terror amid an elegantly decaying Venice in Nicolas Roeg’s brilliantly disturbing horror milestone.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A conversation between editor Graeme Clifford and film writer and historian Bobbie O’Steen, an interview with composer Pino Donaggio, programs on the making of the film, and more.

A researcher’s psychological experiments take him to the outer limits of consciousness in Ken Russell’s brainwave-blasting cosmic freakout.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by film historian Samm Deighan, interviews with Russell and actor William Hurt, and more.

A young mother-to-be (Mia Farrow) grows increasingly suspicious that her overfriendly neighbors are concealing satanic secrets in the ultimate occult shocker.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A documentary featuring interviews with director Roman Polanski, Farrow, and producer Robert Evans; an interview with author Ira Levin; and more.

Two Jeremy Irons are twice as diabolical in David Cronenberg’s chilling tale of twin gynecologists caught in a whirlpool of sexual confusion, drugs, and madness.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Cronenberg, Irons, editor Ron Sanders, production designer Carol Spier, and cinematographer Peter Suschitzky; and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Bathed in electric color, bursting with kaleidoscopic set pieces, and dripping with blood, the thrillers of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento are vivid excursions into baroque excess and dreamlike abstraction. Setting a new benchmark for the giallo murder mystery—complete with black-gloved killers, intricately staged violence, and psychosexual delirium—with The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o’ Nine Tails, Argento continued to push his style into increasingly surreal realms with masterpieces like the supernatural tour de force Inferno and the self-reflexive giallo deconstruction Tenebrae.

FEATURING: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Cat o’ Nine Tails (1971), Inferno (1980), Tenebrae (1982), Two Evil Eyes (1990)

Merging psychological dread with existential inquiry, the films of Japanese auteur Kiyoshi Kurosawa use genre trappings to probe the alienation and anxiety underpinning modern life. Quivering with whisper-quiet unease that gathers with slow-burn intensity, the J-horror touchstones Cure and Pulse are indelibly disturbing visions of psychic disintegration and technological contagion, while thrillers like Serpent’s Path and Cloud blend gripping suspense with incisive social commentary. And in sui generis dramas like Bright Future and To the Ends of the Earth, Kurosawa brings his keen-eyed formalism to stories of characters cast adrift in an increasingly uncertain world.

FEATURING: Door III (1996), Cure (1997), Serpent’s Path (1998), Spider’s Eyes (1998), Charisma (1999), Pulse (2001), Bright Future (2003),* Penance (2012), Creepy (2016), To the Ends of the Earth (2019), Cloud (2024), Serpent’s Path (2024)

Godfather of the queercore movement that challenged respectability politics with punk defiance, Bruce LaBruce leaves no taboo unshattered in his outrageously subversive, unabashedly kinky cinematic provocations. Bringing underground camp humor to a queer reimagining of Sunset Boulevard with Hustler White, necrolust to the goth zombie satire Otto; or, Up with Dead People, and surprising tenderness to the sexually frank age-gap love story Gerontophilia, LaBruce asserts a radically queer vision that finds liberation in transgression.

FEATURING: Hustler White (1996), Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008), Gerontophilia (2013)

One of the defining figures of Philippine cinema, Mike De Leon brought a razor-sharp formal precision, fierce political intelligence, and subversive edge to a remarkable array of genres. From the claustrophobic domestic horror of Kisapmata to the harrowing college-hazing drama Batch ’81 to the wild rock-opera satire Will Your Heart Beat Faster?, his rigorous, intensely psychological films deploy potent symbolism and provocative allegory to attack patriarchy, abuse of power, and the authoritarian brutality of the Ferdinand Marcos regime.

FEATURING: Itim (1976), Will Your Heart Beat Faster? (1980), Kisapmata (1981), Batch ’81 (1982)

EPISODIC SERIES

From Shinichiro Watanabe, the visionary creator of Cowboy Bebop, this provocative anime series wraps a potent critique of nationalism and abuse of power in the guise of a tantalizing cat-and-mouse puzzle. Operating under the name of Sphinx, two teenage boys unleash a wave of terrorist attacks across Tokyo. As demoted detective Kenjiro Shibazaki races to decipher their cryptic online clues, he gradually uncovers the shocking motive behind their campaign of destruction. With its mesmerizingly moody visuals and a gorgeous score by Yoko Kanno, Terror in Resonance emerges as a haunting meditation on trauma, alienation, and the consequences of institutional violence.

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

Violent, confrontational, and shockingly realistic, Tobe Hooper’s horror landmark remains one of the most terrifying movies ever made.

Nineties indie queen Parker Posey is at her effortlessly cool best in this irresistible comedy as a hard-partying scenester who must take a job as a librarian after she’s arrested for throwing an illegal rave.

Threatened with eviction, six elderly people devise a grisly plan to protect their home in this offbeat, darkly comic ’70s horror gem.

An ancient Chinese vampire navigates life in the modern world in this wildly imaginative blend of folkloric fantasy and punk irreverence.

In anticipation of The Social Reckoning, revisit one of the great films of the twenty-first century thus far. David Fincher’s brilliant and unsettling look at the rise of the social-media era goes behind the scenes of early-2000s startup culture to reveal the moral bankruptcy between the billions.

In Michael Mann’s darkly ravishing second feature, Nazi invaders unwittingly unleash a sinister presence lurking within the walls of an ancient fortress in the Carpathian Alps—a presence that doesn’t take kindly to unwanted guests.

MUSIC FILMS

Bucolic isolation takes on a sense of impending doom in this full-album video for the blistering second album by experimental rock outfit YHWH Nailgun.

Yann Gonzalez directs this luxuriantly transgressive queer horror fantasia starring the xx’s Oliver Sim and featuring songs from his synth-drenched debut solo album.

Just steps away from TIFF Lightbox and Scotiabank Theatre, this space establishes a new physical destination for movie lovers to discover cinema, build their collections, and connect with the community around them.

Last year, the Criterion Mobile Closet made its first international stop at the Toronto International Film Festival, welcoming more than a thousand visitors over the festival’s first weekend. This year, we’re excited to return to Toronto with a new home for the city’s film community.

To celebrate the store opening during TIFF 2026, Criterion is taking over the space throughout the festival, with an extensive selection of titles spanning the breadth of the Criterion Collection, alongside merch—with all Criterion discs 30% off. Cinema Cellar will serve as a destination in the heart of the festival action, offering audiences a place to explore the Criterion Collection at a store conveniently located near the festival’s major downtown venues.

Visitors will have a first look at Criterion’s forthcoming box set The Complete Kubrick, ahead of its official release on October 20, and the chance to shop for recent Criterion editions, including The Elephant Man, Network, Hairspray, Sentimental Value, and many others.

Cinema Cellar’s Criterion offerings will span classic and contemporary cinema from around the world, with a section where Canadians can rediscover some of their country’s most celebrated films. Among the Canadian titles available will be Criterion editions of David Cronenberg’s Crash and François Girard’s Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Two Janus Films titles that had their Canadian premieres at TIFF last year, Magellan and Two Prosecutors, are currently available through the Criterion Premieres line. This year, Janus returns to TIFF with its upcoming release The Dreamed Adventure, making its North American premiere at the festival.

Beyond TIFF, Criterion will have a dedicated section at Cinema Cellar year-round, so Toronto movie lovers will always have a place to discover what Criterion has to offer.

Location:
Cinema Cellar
129 John Street
Toronto