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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’d like to begin with your story. How did you come to make art, and when did you turn to filmmaking?

My parents migrated from Nanchang, China, to Canada, where I was born. They divorced when I was six, so my mom and I came to the U.S. Growing up, I had a stutter, and barely spoke, so the constant movement and instability led me to want to create a sanctuary for myself through art. Poetry and visual art became a portal to another world where I could process familial trauma and set myself free.

 

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

 

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

How did you learn how to make movies?

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

How did queerness become centered in your work, and how does it shape your approach to filmmaking?

Queerness is reflected in my art, in my own being, and in the lives of many people who make up my chosen family. But rather than focusing on queer sexuality or “coming out” stories, I explore queerness as a chosen community that refuses to dispose of one another. As a nonhierarchical way of remaining in intimate kinship with the earth.

 

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

I was struck by the opening scene of Safe Among Stars. Before you see anything, you hear [the protagonist] Jia’s voice at the threshold of what will be a sexual assault, which is how she learns to leave her body. Later, she harnesses that power to bring her lover to a safe, fugitive space.

Yes, that’s totally right. She’s experiencing post-traumatic stress, where trauma stays in the body long after it happened. I wanted to create a metaphor for disassociation through teleportation; Jia, played by Poppy Liu, at the first feeling of discomfort—even with a new trustworthy partner—unwillingly disassociates into a world where she becomes one with flora, inseparable from nature. 

 

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

Let’s talk about Little Sky. How did you come to that story?

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

In Little Sky, you deftly use music to express the characters’ deepest emotions. I was especially moved when Sky sings, “My father put a border in my blood; as long as it stands, I’ll never be free.”

I think the fusion of music and visuals form the lifeblood of a film. Working seamlessly with the visceral 16 mm and digital cinematography by Zamarin Wahdat, and vibrant costume design by Sueann Leung, composer and musical director Lia Ouyang Rusli created a vibrant and textured original score and produced the songs. Kyoko Takenaka, who plays Sky’s friend and eventual bandmate, Miyo, wrote and performs in the culminating song: “If no one sees our light, we will see each other’s.”

 

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

I loved the simplicity of I Wanna Become the Sky and loved you in it. And yet I’m curious why you decided to become the principal actor in that film.

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

 

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

In Roots That Reach Toward the Sky, the lead character, Kai, played by Shirley Chen, is suffering from overwhelming anxiety while working in a space of healing—her mother’s Chinese apothecary. The healer is in desperate need of healing. Was that deliberate?

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

 

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

In all of your films, the plants, the sky, the landscape, food, fabric on a clothesline, jars of herbs are all minor characters. They’re not just background. And they are shot with such loving attention to texture and detail.

I believe that flora and fauna and even minerals actually feel. In my films, I wanted to grant them the same reverence as humans. This we must do in both our storytelling and practice of living if we’re serious about climate justice. The plant and spirit worlds are brought to life in my films through integrating the sound design into the beginning of the creative process. In Roots That Reach Toward the Sky [sound designed and mixed by Yiming Zhang and Haina Zhou], we used sound to immerse viewers in Jia’s experience of noise sensitivity after her window is broken and vandalized. During a panic attack she seeks support from nature by holding on to a resilient plant growing from a crack in the concrete. In Safe Among Stars, I worked with the sound designer Paul Wyderka to create a unique architecture in Jia’s plant-filled sanctuary she teleports to—recalling a church in a dark corner of the mind. We did this through multiple layers of ambient nature sounds, convolution reverb, and delay.

 

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

What is next for you?

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want to go back to the very beginning and talk about the VCR. It was originally intended not as a way of playing prerecorded movies, but as a “time-shifting device.” What did the purveyors of the VCR mean by that?

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

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

Everything was shifting around how movies were being watched at this time. The thing about video stores and VHS, specifically, is that it strikes me as a democratizing force. This was something that rose from the ground up, not from Hollywood, but from independent sources. For instance, the whole idea of releasing pre-recorded films on videotape didn’t come from the studios. It came from Andre Blay at Magnetic Video Corporation, which was a video-duplication service: He convinced Fox that it would be a good idea to release forty of their most popular titles on home video. They did it, and that was the start of movies on home video as we know it.

It was the start of a movie as a commodity. Prior to that, for fifty-plus years, the theatrical experience was ephemeral. You would experience [a movie], and then it would go away. You would have your memories of it, and then maybe you’d see it again someday in some other form. Suddenly you could say, “Oh, I love that movie, I have it at home, I watch it all the time,” or “I’ll loan it to you.” And suddenly the consumers became the archivists. You could sit in your home and have a shelf of your favorite movies. Clearly in retrospect, that is the moment when the consumer’s relationship with what a movie is changed forever. They went from being these magical objects that flew by you like a comet that you were lucky to get to see, to something that was just around all the time.

Looking at Videodrome (1983) and Body Double (1984)—two of the earliest films featured in this series and in Videoheaven—they lay out this idea of tapes as illicit objects. The tapes in those films introduce danger and evil and chaos into people’s lives.

I imagine there was something very mysterious about loving movies your entire life, and then suddenly [experiencing] the illicit feeling of, “I could have this at home now.” That must have been extremely destabilizing to the mind of the film lover. You see it in those movies, and in some of these other ones that you’ve selected: 52 Pick-Up (1986), Lost Highway (1997), The Ring (2002).

52 Pick-Up and Lost Highway also treat the tape as pornography-adjacent. They both feature characters who are makers of pornography. Obviously Body Double is the height of this. But I think there’s something to the fact that pornography enters the home via video. The adult-film industry sided with VHS over Betamax in the format war. In these films, VHS is next to pornography and they just keep being presented together.

Imagine how hard it would have been to get your hands on pornography to own. Then all of a sudden you can just get sex on videotape and watch it in your home. After years of thinking of that as some public exercise in exhibitionism and shame, now you can just buy videos. This is kind of the thesis of Videoheaven: [video is about] taking what has only ever been public and making it private. And what better canary in a coal mine for that than pornography?

I want to ask you a question about watching movies on VHS, which you still do with some regularity, yes?

Yeah, all the time.

Why do you still choose to watch certain films on tape when you could watch them in other formats that are readily available?

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

Many years ago, you recommended to me Daniel Herbert’s book Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store, which analyzes how video stores served as a hub of movie culture from the 1980s to the 2000s. This book would become the inspiration for Videoheaven. What were your major takeaways from it?

It says in his intro, by 1999, video stores were decreased by 20% from their peak a decade earlier. I remember reading that and thinking, that can’t be possible. To me, that was the peak, 1999. Here I am learning that the peak was when I was five, when I was first stepping foot into these stores. I think having the rug pulled out from me factually really opened my eyes to, like, “Oh I actually don’t know this story, because to me the peak is [when there were] Blockbusters every five miles.” If that was the peak, the industry couldn’t have been eradicated as quickly as it was. That just made me feel like, “Wow, this is a very complicated American retail narrative.”

What is it about the eighties that made that the golden era?

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

 

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

To me, that’s the line in the sand of when mom-and-pop stores start really biting the dust. Blockbuster can afford to do the full changeover to DVD. Independently owned stores don’t have as much money to do that.

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

 

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

Weirdly, one of those films is Clerks (1994). It’s not even that disreputable of a movie, but it was huge in the ’90s. And if you’re of a certain age, it was huge to you as a teenager. When I got into my twenties, I guess I started thinking of myself as a more sophisticated, highfalutin guy, and I had no interest anymore in Clerks. Then, in the process of working on Videoheaven and circling back to it I realized, no, this is still great. There’s something that’s genuinely raw and working-class about the film that you never really saw in many other movies in this period.

You know, real ones will remember: historically, what was the cheapest, most affordable, and therefore highly ubiquitous Criterion DVD? Chasing Amy (1997). Everybody had it. To me, Kevin Smith is inextricably linked to the physical-media history of the Criterion Collection because of that. And now the idea that decades later, his inimitable debut film is underrated or underseen is impossible for me to wrap my head around. If you are in your late thirties or forties and you think that Clerks belongs in your adolescence, I think you'd see it now as a visually striking and radically written keystone of nineties independent film.

I’m also tremendously happy to put The Big Hit (1998) on the Criterion Channel. This was a movie that I saw as soon as it came out on video. I don’t even remember why I was aware of it, but I was super into it as a thirteen-year-old. The Big Hit is the Hollywood debut—and the sole Hollywood film at this point—from Hong Kong director Kirk Wong. In the mid-to-late nineties, much of the top Hong Kong talent was going to work in Hollywood. And what I love about this film is that it has a certain kind of abrasive humor. You might even call it obnoxious, but I think it’s very particular to the strain of Hong Kong action cinema that we love. If you watch those movies, it’s nonstop crass humor. And a lot of that gets shaved off with the other filmmakers who go to Hollywood, but Kirk Wong retained it all.

If your casual cultural prejudice against this film is like, “I’ve always assumed that is a garbage, post–Pulp Fiction (1994), guys-with-guns piece of crap,” if the video box scared you off, we have to inform you that The Big Hit is closer to the operatic, Hong Kong–imported American films [of the era] like Face/Off (1997) and Broken Arrow (1996) and Double Team (1997). This is not “The Boondock Saints (1999) but with Mark Wahlberg.” It’s not “Hard Boiled (1992) but with Mark Wahlberg,” but it’s got more of that in it than anyone would think.

 

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

The funny thing about Jeff Lieberman, the director of Remote Control, is that he also used to work for Janus Films back in the early seventies. So there’s decades of Janus and Criterion history running through here. I think Remote Control is a total treat. And in terms of the amount of screen time spent in a video store, it ranks pretty high among all the films in the series.

It’s one of our key texts for sure, and it was a real discovery. I had never seen it. The clip that we leapt out of our seats at is where they’re in the car and they say, “They probably dropped off these brainwashing tapes at every video store in town. Where’s the nearest video store?” And they say it’s a mile down the road. We had been searching for years for any clip to illustrate the idea that in the late eighties, video stores reported that their nearest competition was just a few miles away.

No film lays out the geography of video stores in America in 1988 better than Remote Control. I think it’s also worth pointing readers to Bleeder (1999), which is an early Nicolas Winding Refn film that I had not seen or even heard of before working on Videoheaven. It’s especially notable for having Mads Mikkelsen play a video-store clerk. No matter how many Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) T-shirts you put him in, he will still always look like a male model.

I think he looks pretty great. And that is of course how most clerks see themselves. This is real post-Trainspotting (1996), grimy, funny, gross, losers-in-over-their-heads, drugs-and-sex-and-stealing, extreme boy-movie stuff.

Bleeder is a rare film. As far as I know, this isn’t streaming anywhere else.

If Videoheaven celebrates that kind of esoteric, strange, catch-all video-store culture, you look at the handful of films [in VHS Forever] and it’s like, “What are you in the mood for?” Comedy, horror, thriller, a sweet drama like The Fisher King (1991). We have it all here. We have a foreign section here—Japan, Denmark—you can really go around the world. I think it represents in microcosm the thing that people miss about browsing the sections at a video store.

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

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

Scandal, corruption, and high-stakes power struggles play out amid imposing high-rises and glassy boardrooms in these sleekly tailored tales of office intrigue and money-hungry machinations. In the years between 1987’s Black Monday stock-market crash and 2008’s global financial meltdown, Wall Street, white-shoe law firms, and Fortune 500 companies held a special fascination for Hollywood. In these poisonous portraits of “greed is good” excess (Wall Street, Arbitrage), morally shaded legal dramas (Primal Fear, The Devil’s Advocate), and globe-trotting conspiracy thrillers (Antitrust, The International), competing ambitions, ruthless backstabbing, and murky ethical politics rise to the realm of the Shakespearean.

FEATURING: Wall Street (1987), The Firm (1993)*, Disclosure (1994), Primal Fear (1996)*, The Devil’s Advocate (1997), Antitrust (2001), The Deal (2005), Michael Clayton (2007), The International (2009), Arbitrage (2012)*

COMING JUNE 1: The Game (1997)

Collectors rejoice! Not every film the Criterion Collection has released over the last four decades remains in print. Formats change, licenses expire, and catalogues evolve. But here on the Channel, we’re thrilled to showcase some of the special editions we once released on LaserDisc, DVD, and Blu-ray, along with the supplements that accompanied them. Among the first featured titles in this new ongoing series, you’ll find Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi masterpiece RoboCop, the all-time classic western High Noon, and the monster-movie landmark King Kong—featuring the first commentary track ever recorded.

FEATURING: King Kong (1933), High Noon (1952), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955),* Harold and Maude (1971), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), The Elephant Man (1980), RoboCop (1987)

Following her blistering debut feature, Yeast (featuring a breakthrough performance by a young Greta Gerwig), Mary Bronstein directed Rose Byrne to an Academy Award nomination in her emotionally stunning maternal maelstrom If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. In this edition of Adventures in Moviegoing, Bronstein sits down with Aliza Ma, head of programming for the Criterion Channel, to talk about her love of movies, from her early infatuation with Hollywood legends like Natalie Wood and Marilyn Monroe, whose blend of star power and fragility fascinated her, to discovering the possibilities of indie filmmaking through directors such as Richard Linklater and Todd Solondz. The films she has chosen to present—including Shirley Clarke’s vérité landmark Portrait of Jason, George A. Romero’s horror bombshell Night of the Living Dead, and Susan Seidelman’s punk classic Smithereens—reflect the same uncompromising DIY ethos she has brought to her own work.

FEATURING: Portrait of Jason (1967), Night of the Living Dead (1968), News from Home (1976), Smithereens (1982), Frownland (2007)

Boundary-breaking filmmakers reclaim their stories with these richly varied looks at the trans experience. Long misrepresented on-screen through disreputable and actively harmful images, trans characters have come into focus thanks to a pioneering generation of trans directors determined to capture their lives with nuance and hard-won insight. Curated by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay, authors of the book Corpses, Fools, and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, these revealing counterhistories of cultural trailblazers (Rupert Remembers, No Ordinary Man), intersectional portraits of everyday survival (Drunktown’s Finest, Lingua Franca), and bold explorations of identity in the online age (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps) show that there is no single, common trans film image but rather a kaleidoscope of voices, forms, and lived realities.

FEATURES: Maggots and Men (2009), Drunktown’s Finest (2014), So Pretty (2019), Lingua Franca (2019), No Ordinary Man (2020), We’re All Going To The World’s Fair (2021), Dog Movie (2023), Castration Movie Anthology i. Traps (2024), Queens of Drama (2024)

SHORTS: Gender Troublemakers (1993), Rupert Remembers (2000)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

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

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

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

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

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

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

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

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

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

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

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

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

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

AMERICAN INDEPENDENTS

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

ANIME

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

DOCUMENTARIES

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

SHORT FILMS

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

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

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

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

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

MUSIC FILMS

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

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

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

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

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Premiering April 1 in Surreal Nature Documentaries: Grasshopper Republic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

What was your relationship with film like when you were growing up?

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

 

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

Are there any cinematographers who have influenced the way your films look and feel?

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

You received a production grant for Civic and participated in a lab organized through Netflix and Ghetto Film School’s partnership. You were also a part of Berlinale Talents, another developmental program. Netflix and Berlinale exist at opposite ends of the spectrum. How did you balance Netflix’s more commercial approach with Berlinale’s art-house sensibilities?

That was one of the most incredible moments of my life. I used to say that I always wanted to be on the fence, the border between the two worlds: I wanted to make things that would speak to my mom, my friends, and my community while also staying true to the cinema and art I was drawn to. I wanted all of those things in the room at the same time.

 

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

 

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

There are several tight shots in Civic because the camera never leaves the car. Can you talk about proximity and space in both films, and how they create a sense of intimacy between the characters as well as between them and the audience?

There were character details that Andrew Yuyi Truong and I wrote into the shot list. We approached it as if we were writing a text: we described what the identity of the camera was, and how that related to the audience’s relationship with the film. In Civic, we wrote the camera as if it were a ghost entity that had its own interests, perspective, and relationship with Booker. Sometimes the camera just wants to focus on that without framing it in a conventional way.

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

Watching Civic, I got the sense that music was Booker’s passion. There’s a scene where his friend Tee plays some old music and they discuss the contents of an old hard drive. It would be easy to assume that Booker is involved in hip-hop, given what we learn there. Why did you wait to disclose what took him away from South Central?

I love that you made that connection because it’s not something I’ve talked to anybody about. I used to make music during a time in LA when there were people around me who are huge stars now, but I knew internally that life wasn’t for me. But imagine going off onto the buoy: Yo, I’m just out here in the ocean. I really don’t know what direction I’m going in. The Bookers in all three films are different and come from different universes with relationships to migration. So the Booker from Civic isn’t necessarily the Booker from Now, Hear Me Good, though they do have some kind of spiritual connection and through line. Barrington and I defined what the Booker in Civic went away to do, and we utilized that in our own internal work in terms of rehearsals and the spiritual effort needed to make the film deeper.

 

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

Did you always envision this as a trilogy, and how did Civic become the first installment?

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within this self-echoing dynamic, a clear narrative arc emerged, one that juxtaposed perceived Indigenous savagery against the era’s most advanced visual technology. The manufactured result was white supremacy's triumph over Indigeneity, whose antiquation was understood by outsiders to be inevitable and justified. But even though American cinema constructed and disseminated self-affirming nationalist illusions from its earliest days, it is crucial to differentiate between the cultural uses to which film has been put and the inherent qualities of the technology itself. A little less than a century after the birth of cinema, Native Americans began to demonstrate that such exploitation was not an intrinsic requirement of film as a medium.

Preceding this breakthrough, though, is a long and brutal history of racist depictions that stretches back to the inception of commercial cinema. When the Holland Brothers debuted their original Kinetoscope Parlor in New York City in 1894, the viewing devices conceived by Thomas Edison showed sensationally marketed twenty-second loops of vaudeville and circus acts. To meet audience demand, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, head of Edison Manufacturing Company’s kinetograph department, was tasked with producing new motion pictures, many of them “actuality films”—precursors to documentaries that blended fact and fiction. Shortly after the parlor’s opening, Edison invited “Buffalo Bill” William F. Cody and his Wild West show performers to visit his Black Maria studio to be captured on camera. Dickson and his assistant William Heise shot eight films, including two featuring Lakota performers: Buffalo Dance and Sioux Ghost Dance (both 1894). Cody presented these individuals as spoils of Manifest Destiny and survivors of the Indian Wars. The eighteen-second Sioux Ghost Dance allegedly featured the titular ritual—a rite banned by the federal government and widely reported for its connection to a pan-Indian revivalist movement and the Wounded Knee Massacre four years prior. Both films are believed to be the first depicting Native Americans.

That the dance performed in Sioux Ghost Dance was not in fact the one stated in the title was of no concern to the filmmaker or the frontier showman, nor was the consideration that capturing and advertising this ritual could have risked real legal consequences for the Lakota participants themselves. Firmly rooted in the expectations of Wild West show ballyhoo, such films framed Indigenous realities as curios, performances by a vanishing people delivered and sold to satisfy an explicitly white settler-colonial fascination.

From these earliest moments, it became commonplace to present staged, inauthentic depictions of Indigenous life as fact, driven by popular interest in primitivism and exoticism. The trend continued to develop through successful commercial features such as Edward S. Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), which heavily embellished and reenacted Kwakwaka’wakw life. This phenomenon reached a high point with Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922). As the first commercially successful nonfiction feature, Flaherty’s flagrantly staged portrayal of an Inuk man established a precedent for “salvage ethnography”—the practice of creating a record of a people’s traditional way of life before its assumed disappearance. It’s within the muddied waters of cinema’s primordial soup that the art form’s complicated and unique relationship with Indigenous peoples began to take shape.

This largely unchallenged dynamic began to shift as the dust settled following the social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s. A renewed sense of self-determination and political activism among Native American communities led to landmark legislative victories, a cultural renaissance, the rise of groups like the American Indian Movement, and a strong stand against assimilation. This context spurred a movement for Indigenous people to reassert cultural sovereignty and control their own narratives across all domains, from public policy to the arts. Coinciding with these developments, the widespread availability of video and film technology in the early ’80s empowered a number of Native artists from disparate backgrounds. A survey of this trajectory, though far from complete, is available in the Criterion Channel’s Native Nonfiction series, which features many titles previously rare to screen and offers a look at the movement from its origins to the present day.

Moving beyond simply correcting misrepresentations, many of the artists behind the earliest films in this series began to explore individual interpretations of Indigeneity as it related to their lived experiences. A key center for this activity was UCLA’s Department of Motion Pictures, Television, and Radio, notably after the 1969 founding of the university’s American Indian Studies Center (AISC). In an effort parallel to the film school’s LA Rebellion—a movement known for the emergence of Black filmmakers such as Larry Clark, Julie Dash, and Charles Burnett—Native American students, including Sandra Osawa (a member of the Makah Nation), Orie Medicinebull (Mono), and Arlene Bowman (Diné), started to establish a new dynamic for Native American nonfiction filmmaking during their time in the program.

One example of this can be seen in Arlene Bowman’s 1985 student film Navajo Talking Picture, a thought-provoking exploration of the tensions between internal and external perspectives of her culture. After studying at UCLA, Bowman returns to the Navajo Nation to document her grandmother’s traditional ways of life. There, she faces vehement objections to her filming from the matriarch, who views the project as an invasion of privacy. Despite resistance, Bowman creates a portrait of an assimilated Navajo artist struggling to use a “white man’s” medium to capture her cultural heritage. The film acts as a cautionary tale, illustrating critical problems with consent, cultural sensitivity, and the taboos of being filmed or having knowledge shared against one’s will.

Outside of the efforts of UCLA’s Native student filmmakers, artists such as Victor Masayesva Jr. (Hopi) also developed work in their home communities, rooting their perspective firmly in their customs and concerns. After studying at Princeton and the University of Arizona, Masayesva directed Hotevilla’s Ethnic Heritage Program, starting a Hopi language program in 1980. Footage from this resulted in his 1982 short documentary Hopiit, a montage of Hopi landscapes and people over a year, which paved the way for his debut feature film. In 1985, he produced his feature-length documentary Itam Hakim, Hopiit (“we / someone, the Hopi”), a visual interpretation of Hopi history and philosophy as recounted by a tribal elder. Made for the Hopi Tricentennial (an occasion marking the three hundred years since the 1680 Pueblo Revolt against Spanish rule), the film shares community recollections, including the Hopi origin story, tales of perseverance, and Bow Clan migration stories, challenging viewers to understand the Hopi concept of cyclic time.

These documentaries, created by Native American filmmakers, radically departed from the established conventions of prior nonfiction cinema. Their direct approach was initially a welcome change for Indigenous audiences, yet it simultaneously invited others to experience their unique perspectives. This cultural specificity also gave rise to new formal approaches that were informed by and mirrored Indigenous cultural viewpoints, and went on to establish the foundation for future developments in Native nonfiction filmmaking.

The early ’90s marked a boom in Native American nonfiction, fueled by accessible technology, the rise of independent festivals, and improved funding and distribution through platforms like the American Indian Film Festival, Vision Maker Media, the National Museum of the American Indian’s Film and Video Center, and Sundance’s Native Forum. Native American documentaries of this era took a self-reflexive turn, exemplified by Terry Macy and Daniel Hart’s White Shamans and Plastic Medicine Men (1996), questioning what it means for Indigenous filmmakers to engage with the medium and its legacy. Macy and Hart’s film subverts historical expectations by humorously studying non-Indigenous people exploiting Native culture and spiritual traditions, marking a logical end point of salvage ethnography in American documentaries. Unlike the previous decade’s cultural exploration and inward turn, the ’90s saw Native artists test nonfiction filmmaking as a tool for changing the tides.

At the dawn of the new millennium, Native American documentaries continued to expand their focus, moving toward nuanced explorations of contemporary life and cultural continuity within a modern context. This shift is marked by films like Billy Luther’s Miss Navajo (2007), which centers on the annual Miss Navajo Nation pageant. Luther’s work captures the rigorous process by which young Diné women proved their mastery of both traditional language and modern skills, effectively framing the film as an internal look at cultural survival and self-definition rather than a response to external expectations. The film remains a key document of twenty-first-century Indigenous self-representation.

In the next decade, Native nonfiction filmmaking evolved significantly, embracing deeply personal and experimental approaches. This phase is characterized by a fluidity between documentary, essay film, and experimental cinema, often concentrating on themes of language, community memory, and the transient nature of culture.

One of the highlights of this period, Sterlin Harjo’s 2014 film This May Be the Last Time, is a meditation on communal survival and tradition that anchors itself in Creek and Seminole ceremonial songs, expertly combining performance, oral history, and nonfiction. Similarly, Adam and Zack Khalil’s 2016 work INAATE/SE/ [it shines a certain way. to a certain place./it flies. falls.] deconstructs the colonial gaze. By merging archival footage, vérité, and spoken word based on the Anishinaabe Seven Fires prophecy, the film establishes a multilayered Indigenous epistemology on-screen. Continuing this formally innovative tradition, Blackhorse Lowe’s Hooghan (2018) offers an intimate look at Diné spirituality and familial ties. The film, which documents the construction of a hogan (a traditional Navajo dwelling), further illustrates the medium’s capacity for culturally specific and self-determined narratives.

These innovations culminate in Sky Hopinka’s (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga) 2020 feature maɬni—towards the ocean, towards the shore, an impressionistic and profoundly poetic exploration of the Chinook Wawa language and Pacific Northwest landscapes. Hopinka’s work, which eschews linear narrative in favor of a hypnotic meditation on life, death, and cultural persistence, is a significant contemporary high point, demonstrating Native nonfiction’s capacity for establishing entirely new, culturally specific cinematic languages. The film was a landmark that opened up the possibilities for what Native American nonfiction filmmaking could hold and set the stage for what has developed in this unfolding decade.

Presently, Native American nonfiction cinema is being sculpted by formal innovation and bold cultural assertion, suggesting an exciting future. Recent works like Woodrow Hunt’s Faces, Displays, and Other Imaginary Things (2021), Shaandiin Tome and Rayka Zehtabchi’s Long Line of Ladies (2022), Fox Maxy’s F1ghting Looks Different 2 Me Now (2022), and Loren Waters’s Tiger (2025) demonstrate the field’s vitality. By embracing hybrid forms, experimental aesthetics, and unflinching personal narratives, contemporary Native artists are redefining the documentary on their own terms, ensuring the medium remains a powerful, culturally sovereign tool for whomever and whatever comes next.

Reflecting in this moment, one wonders what the Lakota dancers from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show would have made of all this as they performed in the Black Maria. While it’s known that they did not recreate the Ghost Dance for Dickson’s film, the ritual they did perform has since been identified as a Lakota Grass Dance—a dynamic Plains Native American men’s dance rooted in warrior traditions, signifying the preparation of ground for camp, healing, and respect for the land. Is it possible that, instead of unknowingly having their work misrepresented for the sake of their own exploitation, they subversively demonstrated a different dance than the one Cody, Dickson, or Edison asked them to perform? While it is entirely possible they didn’t, the meaning of the dance itself puts the developments of Native American nonfiction in a different light.

There is an origin story of the Grass Dance that centers on a disabled boy seeking guidance to move like other children. In this tale, the child’s grandfather advises him to go to a sacred sweetgrass area and fast, pray, and seek a vision for four days. Tested by the elements, the boy nearly gives up on the final day. Later, a deer approaches him and asks about his endeavor. Seeing his pure intention, the animal gives him songs about a buffalo that endures a storm by moving forward, knowing that a rainbow follows. The boy brings these songs back to his people and, by singing them, gradually gains movement in his legs and is eventually able to dance symmetrically. The songs and dance were originally for healing. Ultimately, this tale of endurance and vision-seeking mirrors the resilient and revelatory nature of Native nonfiction cinema itself, a tradition that has created something new from what was once broken.

LeRoy’s jaundiced view of American society was able to flourish in the brief period known as the pre-Code era—a stretch of years before censorship protocols began to be strictly enforced. By 1922, industry moguls had introduced self-regulation as a way of addressing the emergence of local censorship boards in various parts of the United States, which threatened to disrupt exhibition by unilaterally recutting or suppressing films to comply with policies that sometimes varied state by state. The result was the creation of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and, most pointedly, in 1934, the Production Code Administration. A middle-aged Republican from Indiana, Will Hays, served as the first president of the MPPDA (now the MPA), and in 1930, he (along with a prominent Hollywood trade magazine publisher and a Jesuit priest) drafted a nineteen-page code that aimed to restrict on-screen content, including everything from profanity and nudity to depictions of venereal disease, “white slavery,” and miscegenation. But it was not until the midthirties that this code went into effect, kicking off a stretch of three decades in which Hollywood’s portrayal of reality was severely curtailed.

Before the Code’s influence had fully set in, Hollywood largely ignored it and continued to churn out bold and bawdy entertainments for its expanding audience. Some of these movies were brazenly exploitative or taboo-busting, while others, like those that LeRoy directed, simply depicted sex, violence, and crime as normal parts of modern life.

LeRoy’s youth made him especially attuned to the margins of society. He was born an only child in San Francisco at the turn of the century—on a kitchen table, at two and a half pounds—then placed in a turkey roasting pan in the oven, which became his makeshift incubator. His mother left him and his father when young Mervyn was five years old. The following year, disaster struck again, when the massive 1906 earthquake demolished the family home and the store that his father owned. For six months, LeRoy and his father lived in Tent City, a provisional camp run by the Army during a period when San Francisco was under martial law. Eventually, LeRoy’s father found work as a Heinz pickle salesman, and Mervyn became a newsboy to support him both financially and emotionally. In 1914, he was selling papers in front of the Alcazar, his mother’s favorite vaudeville venue, when an encounter with actor Theodore Roberts led to him joining the theater’s ensemble and kickstarting his show-business career.

The best of LeRoy’s pre-Code films—ten of which are now available on the Criterion Channel—are works of stark realism. The women characters are bold, fearless, and independent. The Great Depression is faced head-on. Cons and bootleg liquor abound. These films also established LeRoy’s gift for narrative economy—plots that would stretch across multiple seasons of a contemporary television series are condensed into a potent hour and a half—as well as his rapid and efficient shooting style. These films favor long takes and fluid mise-en-scène over scenes broken up by conventional continuity editing. When a close-up hits the screen, it packs a punch.

One of LeRoy’s greatest triumphs arrived early in his directing career. His 1931 adaptation of W. R. Burnett’s novel Little Caesar—the thirteenth feature film LeRoy had made in just four years—was a smash hit and significantly elevated his stature at Warner Bros. While this was not the first-ever gangster film—and not even the first produced at Warner Bros.—Little Caesar nonetheless resonated with audiences and critics alike, heralding the advent of a now-famous cycle of crime pictures, including The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932).

The movie set the template: a feral hood ruthlessly climbs the underworld food chain, only to discover the perils of being at the top. Edward G. Robinson stars as Caesar Enrico “Rico” Bandello, a trigger-happy tough who graduates from gunning down gas stations for cash to running a major crime syndicate in Chicago. Rico bristles with hostility; at times, he seems to be practically crawling out of his skin with rage. At no point does LeRoy offer any significant backstory explaining how the protagonist became such a sadistic monster. We meet him in medias res, a fully formed misfit. Yet, like many characters in other LeRoy films, Rico soon becomes a paranoid loner, trapped in a dead end of his own making, perhaps running from a destructive past.

LeRoy reunited with Robinson for the equally popular (though now largely forgotten) Five Star Final (1931). In this film, everyone is either cheating or being cheated. Robinson stars as the editor of a flailing tabloid—the New York Evening Gazette—that tries to boost circulation by reviving a twenty-year-old murder case involving a woman named Nancy Vorhees, who shot her unfaithful husband. Living under a pseudonym, Vorhees is about to marry off the now-adult daughter she had with her first husband when the case returns to the headlines. LeRoy depicts not only the unscrupulous lows to which the press will stoop to get a story—including impersonating clergy—but also the shocking toll this ordeal takes on Vorhees and her family, leaving a trail of dead bodies in its wake.

The world that LeRoy creates in these films is one in which the buffoonish upper classes cling to power as everyone else scrambles to survive. Both High Pressure (1932) and Hard to Handle (1933) follow the spiraling schemes of bona fide grifters. In High Pressure, William Powell plays “the greatest promoter in the world,” whom we first meet crumpled on a couch after a drinking binge. We see him, après schvitz, hawking shares for a fictional business, the Golden Gate Artificial Rubber Co., in a pyramid scheme whose dizzying heights LeRoy depicts with anarchic charm. James Cagney takes on a similar role in Hard to Handle, though he’s faster in both his talking and his running—and, naturally, both films include several scenes in which these con men literally sprint away from the messes they’ve made. These men are not viewed as aberrations. In LeRoy’s pre-Code movies, a scam is as American as apple pie.

Two very different films—the comic Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) and the tragic Three on a Match (1932)—find LeRoy turning his focus to the lives of women trying to get by in the big city. The quartet of showgirls at the center of Gold Diggers are accustomed to their shows closing before they even open, but their luck changes when they meet a palooka songwriter who is secretly wealthy. The film oscillates between LeRoy’s punch-drunk comedy and Busby Berkeley’s grandly surreal production numbers, which even manage to find cinematic wonder in soup lines and street-level urban desolation.

Three on a Match follows a trio of public-school peers who reunite as adults. In one breathless hour, we observe these women’s fates: the former “worst girl in school” (Joan Blondell) ends up in a reformatory for grand larceny; the valedictorian (Bette Davis) becomes a stenographer; and the popular girl (Ann Dvorak) is a bored and immensely wealthy housewife. There is a vertiginous downward turn for one of these characters, who resurfaces as a coke-addled guttersnipe holding a child for ransom. LeRoy does not shy away from depicting the depths of her desperation; a shocking climactic scene involving an upper-floor window that has been nailed shut may make viewers gasp aloud.

Perhaps the greatest film of LeRoy’s career originates from this period. By his own assessment the most important movie he ever made, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) is based on the true story and autobiography of Robert Elliott Burns, and involved his direct collaboration. Burns’s presence in California to work on the script was kept secret to prevent his extradition to Georgia, where he was a wanted man for escaping the very chain gang he had written about.

Fresh off his leading role in Scarface, Paul Muni stars as a returning World War I sergeant who leaves the safety of his post in the shipping department of his hometown’s shoe factory to crisscross the country in search of construction work, hoping to become an engineer. Instead, he winds up a vagabond. One night, starving, he unwittingly gets involved in a petty robbery of a diner car and finds himself sentenced to ten years of hard labor on a chain gang. LeRoy’s depiction of Muni’s incarceration is chilling; lashings, punches, and verbal abuse are standard treatment at the prison. As with several of the films in this series, I Am a Fugitive hardly uses any nondiegetic music, so much of the horror unfolds in unnerving silence, punctuated only by the clang of chains and the shouts of men. The film concludes with a Kafkaeque spiral of bleakness and one of the grimmest endings in Hollywood history.

LeRoy was, in many ways, the quintessential company man—he not only married a Warner (Doris, who was the daughter of Harry M. Warner, then president of Warner Brothers–First National Pictures, where LeRoy directed all the films in this series), he named his son Warner. But a closer look at the director’s pre-Code work reveals another side of him: inside this reliable company man was a streetwise kid teetering on the edge of ruin, surviving on his own smarts.

This month on the Criterion Channel, step into the video store of your dreams: VHS Forever celebrates the technology that revolutionized film culture. A spotlight on the Romanian New Wave highlights the brilliant movement that brought an unsparing, dryly funny eye to the country’s post-Communist realities, while a retrospective dedicated to pioneering queer filmmaker Monika Treut encompasses taboo-shattering erotica and sensitive nonfiction alike. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including a trio of Gwyneth Paltrow performances, the complete first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the exclusive premiere of a new Charlie Kaufman short starring Jessie Buckley, the vicious teen-movie favorite Cruel Intentions, and the lone feature to date directed by The Sopranos creator David Chase.

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*Indicates programming available only in the U.S.

TOP STORIES

Fifty years ago, the introduction of VHS to the consumer market revolutionized the way people watched movies, bringing classics, the latest hits, obscure cult favorites, underground bootlegs, and disreputable marginalia alike into their homes with hitherto unimaginable convenience. This ode to analog traces the ripple effect that VHS had on the wider pop-culture landscape and imagination—from the rise of video-store culture in the 1980s and ’90s (Clerks, The Watermelon Woman) to the often obsessive nature of home recording (Speaking Parts, Benny’s Video) to the disturbing results of transgressive images invading the domestic space (Videodrome, Ring). Together they comprise a panoramic meta-history of the distinctively grainy, static-flecked medium that forever altered our relationship to the moving image.

Programmed by Clyde Folley

FEATURING: Videodrome (1983), Body Double (1984), 52 Pick-Up (1986), Re-Wind (1988), Remote Control (1988), Speaking Parts (1989), The Fisher King (1991), Benny’s Video (1992), Clerks (1994)*, The Watermelon Woman (1996), Lost Highway (1997), The Big Hit (1998), Ring (1998), Bleeder (1999), The Ring (2002)*, Videoheaven (2025)*

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Gwyneth Paltrow reigned supreme with her poise, intelligence, and timeless sense of style. Her cool sophistication and ability to portray fragile intimacy are on display in the emotionally raw chamber drama Two Lovers and the sleek thriller A Perfect Murder, while her sharp wit and emotional precision redefined the romantic heroine in Sliding Doors. Inspired by her triumphant return to the big screen in Marty Supreme, we present a trio of favorites that perfectly showcase her inimitable star power.

FEATURING: A Perfect Murder (1998), Sliding Doors (1998), Two Lovers (2008)

While Charlie Kaufman is best known for cerebral, intricately constructed metafictions like Anomalisa and Synecdoche, New York, his recent collaborations with writer Eva H.D. find him working in a different mode: impressionistic, intuitive, and vividly sensorial. Both city symphonies of a kind, these two shorts—the restless New York cine-poem Jackals & Fireflies and the aching, Athens-set elegy How to Shoot a Ghost, starring Jessie Buckley—drift dreamily through the urban landscape, finding bruising poignancy in the small, fleeting moments and encounters that give life its infinite richness.

FEATURING: Jackals & Fireflies (2023), How to Shoot a Ghost (2025)

Through a mix of razor-sharp realism and pitch-black humor, the films of the Romanian New Wave turn everyday dilemmas into gripping moral dramas. Provocatively merging the personal and the political, leading directors like Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lazarescu), Corneliu Porumboiu (12:08 East of Bucharest), and Cristian Mungiu (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days) confront the legacy of Communism and the messy transition that followed Nicolae Ceaușescu’s authoritarian regime, revealing the lingering bureaucratic absurdities and indignities that continue to shape day-to-day life and its endless ethical choices. Made with modest means but unmistakable assuredness, these powerful, unsparing works are models of minimalist filmmaking at its most urgent and alive.

FEATURING: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005), 12:08 East of Bucharest (2006), 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007), Police, Adjective (2009), Aurora (2010), Tuesday, After Christmas (2010), Sieranevada (2016)

Presented in both the original and English-dubbed versions

Of the myriad adaptations of the foundational cyberpunk manga Ghost in the Shell, the animated TV series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex arguably comes closest to capturing the breadth, vision, and thematic complexity of the original. The twenty-six-episode first season unfolds as a riveting science-fiction crime procedural, following the members of the specialized police unit known as Public Security Section 9 as they investigate high-profile cyberterrorism incidents in a future where humans have increasingly become cybernetic hybrids. Their work ultimately leads them into the case of the Laughing Man, an elusive hacktivist whose attempts to expose a vast web of corporate and political corruption threaten to destabilize powerful institutions. Combining sleek visuals with provocative themes surrounding the dissolving boundaries between humans and technology, Stand Alone Complex remains a thrilling high point in the art of anime: absorbing, intelligent, and often unsettlingly prescient.

Ever since her daring debut feature, the fearlessly transgressive S&M exploration Seduction: The Cruel Woman, Monika Treut has been at the forefront of queer cinema, illuminating LGBTQ+ lives with subversive wit, uncompromising honesty, and compassionate insight. Fiercely controversial in her native Germany—where the newspaper Die Zeit once proclaimed that “films like Monika Treut’s are destroying cinema”—Treut found wider acceptance in the burgeoning queer film-festival and American independent-cinema scenes, leading to decades-long collaborations with queer trailblazers like trans poet Max Wolf Valerio (Max) and “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle (Female Misbehavior). Spanning narrative (Virgin Machine, My Father Is Coming) and documentary (Didn’t Do It for Love, Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities) modes, these films are taboo-shattering, playfully intelligent explorations of sex and gender that defy repressive cultural norms to shed light on the often-hidden arcs of queer twentieth-century history.

FEATURES: Seduction: The Cruel Woman (1985), Virgin Machine (1988), My Father Is Coming (1991), Female Misbehavior (1992), Didn’t Do It for Love (1997), Gendernauts: A Journey Through Shifting Identities (1999), Genderation (2021)

SHORTS: Max (1992)

EXCLUSIVE PREMIERES

In China, a new industry has emerged devoted to helping couples stay married in the face of infidelity. Wang Zhenxi is part of this growing profession, a “mistress dispeller” who is hired to maintain the bonds of marriage—and break up affairs—by any means necessary. Offering strikingly intimate access to private dramas usually hidden behind closed doors, Elizabeth Lo’s spellbinding documentary follows a real, unfolding case of infidelity as Teacher Wang attempts to bring a couple back from the edge of crisis. Their story shifts our sympathies between husband, wife, and mistress to explore the ways emotion, pragmatism and cultural norms collide to shape romantic relationships in contemporary China.

A heartfelt coming-of-age anthem and a mesmerizing vision of resistance, rebellion, and the irrepressible spirit of youth, the at once humorous and incisive feature debut from director Neo Sora imagines the high school experience in a dystopian near-future Tokyo. There, after best friends Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka) pull an audacious prank on their principal, the school responds by installing an elaborate surveillance system. Between the oppressive new security measures, a darkening national political climate, and the omnipresent threat of catastrophic earthquakes, the increasingly disillusioned Kou finds himself inspired to take a stand as an activist, while the passive Yuta remains seemingly unaware of what is going on around him. For the first time in their lifelong friendship, the two are forced to reckon with differences they had never confronted before.

Cultural hub, consumer mecca, and source of existential dread: the video-rental store forever changed the way we interact with movies. With narration by Maya Hawke and footage culled from hundreds of sources—from TV commercials to blockbuster films—this sprawling, engrossing, and witty pop-culture deep dive from director Alex Ross Perry (Pavements, Her Smell) tells the story of the video store’s glorious, confusing, novel, sometimes seedy, and undeniably seismic impact on American movie culture.

Part ghost story, part city symphony, this elegiac short directed by Charlie Kaufman traces the meeting of two recently deceased young people—a troubled photographer (Jessie Buckley) and a gay translator (Josef Akiki)—whose restless souls wander the streets of Athens, Greece, where they confront both the remnants of the city’s history and the wreckage of their own unresolved lives. Folding complex ideas around mortality, memory, and migration into exquisite, ethereal images, Kaufman arrives at a breathtakingly moving vision of two outsiders searching for connection and consolation beyond the bounds of life.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project

Featuring introductions to each of the films by Scorsese

Restored by The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project, these rediscovered classics from around the world include awe-inspiring epics from Algeria (Chronicle of the Years of Fire) and Kazakhstan (The Fall of Otrar), an enchanting Indian fable (Kummatty), and a profound family portrait from Burkina Faso (Yam daabo).

FEATURING: Chronicle of the Years of Fire (1975), Kummatty (1979), Yam daabo (1987), The Fall of Otrar (1991)

The feature-film debut from David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, is a uniquely unsentimental, open-ended coming-of-age story set in the counterculture explosion of midcentury America. In 1960s New Jersey, teenager Doug Damiano (John Magaro), inspired by the English invasion of bands like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, drops out of college to pursue his musical dreams by starting his own rock ’n’ roll band. As his ambitions clash with reality and tensions rise with both his bandmates and his disapproving father (James Gandolfini), what emerges is a complicated, bittersweet reflection on generational sea change and the formation of identity, all set to a perfect period soundtrack featuring greats ranging from Bo Diddley to Bob Dylan.

Norah Drain (Juliet Prowse), a Manhattan disco hostess, is being terrorized by a stalker and obscene phone caller. NYPD Lieutenant Dave Madden (Jan Murray) takes a personal interest in her case, finding himself drawn not only to Norah but to the sordid desires of the Times Square sex district. As Norah begins to question Madden’s intentions, a sullen busboy (Sal Mineo) plunges her into a fight for her life on the streets of New York City. Evocatively shot on location in stark black and white, the daringly ahead-of-its-time Who Killed Teddy Bear—presented here in its long-unseen, fully uncensored form—is a relentlessly tawdry time capsule of midsixties Times Square.

Four Nights of a Dreamer is Robert Bresson’s great forgotten masterpiece, a stark yet haunting ode to romantic idealism and the capriciousness of love. Adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “White Nights,” Four Nights of a Dreamer follows Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts), a lonely artist who roams bohemian Paris in search of the girl of his dreams. One night he saves a beautiful young woman, Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), from plunging into the Seine in despair over her rejection by an avoidant lover (Jean-Maurice Monnoyer). Jacques compassionately attempts to reunite Marthe with her beau, but his feelings for his new friend soon become less than platonic and his investment in her personal drama far from selfless. Four Nights of a Dreamer has been called the French master’s “loveliest” work: with his signature minimalism, Bresson films the shimmering beauty of nocturnal Paris as it enfolds his characters in endless possibility—subtly capturing the wonder of unexpected connection and the mystery of fate.

Robert Bresson’s almost abstract rendering of the Arthurian legend—the tale of the titular knight’s quest for the Holy Grail and his love affair with Guinevere—approaches the realm of pure cinema, unfolding as a hypnotic study in the movement of bodies, the clanking of armor, the rhythm of galloping horses, and the spurting of blood. A mesmerizing reimagining of myth, Lancelot du lac (“Lancelot of the Lake”) finds the French iconoclast blending the earthy and the spiritual, the elemental and the transcendent, to ecstatic effect.

He’s an unscrupulous newspaperman eager to exploit the story of a young woman’s death by radium poisoning. She knows she’s not really dying but can’t pass up a free trip to New York with all the trimmings. Carole Lombard and Fredric March costar in this black-comedy classic nimbly directed by William A. Wellman. Taking caustic aim at how tabloid journalism feeds the morbid curiosity of a scandal-hungry public, Ben Hecht’s sharply satirical screenplay remains as fresh and biting as ever.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning masterpiece is a cathartic exploration of art, grief, and what it means to go on living when there is seemingly no road ahead.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: An interview with Hamaguchi, a program about the making of the film, and press-conference footage from the premiere.

Lena Dunham established herself as a generational voice with her debut feature, an incisive portrait of post-college ennui graced with sharp wit and confessional authenticity.

This stark, shocking vision of contemporary gangsterdom traces the Mafia corruption that extends from the housing projects to the world of haute couture in Naples, Italy.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: A documentary on the making of the film; interviews with director Matteo Garrone, actor Toni Servillo, and writer Roberto Saviano; and more.

A depressed radio DJ (Jeff Bridges) and a homeless man (Robin Williams) find unexpected connection in Terry Gilliam’s poignant, Manhattan-set fairy tale of redemption.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Gilliam, interviews with cast and crew members, deleted scenes, and more.

Two college roommates seek an illegal abortion in Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or–winning account of the impossible choices women face when taking control of their bodies means breaking the law.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with Mungiu and critic Jay Weissberg, a documentary on the film’s reception in Romania, alternate and deleted scenes, and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

A singular, iconoclastic artist, Robert Bresson left behind an astonishing body of work, defined by the search for what he called “not beautiful images, but necessary images.” In a long, visionary career that began in the 1940s and ended in the 1980s, he continually refined the strict precision of his famously ascetic style—abolishing psychology, professional actors, and ornate camera work, and instead concentrating on the exactingly choreographed movements of his “models” (as he called his performers) and the anguished solitude of his martyred characters. In indelible visions of suffering and salvation like Pickpocket, Au hasard Balthazar, Four Nights of a Dreamer, and The Devil, Probably, he stripped cinema to its essence to reveal nothing less than the very soul of his subjects.

FEATURING: Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), Lancelot du lac (1974), The Devil, Probably (1977), L’argent (1983)

William Klein’s explosive New York street photography made him one of the most heralded artists of the sixties. As an American expatriate in Paris, Klein also made bold, challenging cinema in a filmmaking career that spanned more than forty years. In his three colorful, surreal fiction features—Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, Mr. Freedom, and The Model Couple—he skewers the fashion industry, American empire, and governmental mind control with hilarious, cutting aplomb, while his essential documentaries Muhammad Ali, the Greatest and Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther capture two of the most galvanizing personalities of his time with electrifying immediacy. Still largely overlooked in the United States, his films are audacious, iconoclastic antidotes to all forms of social oppression.

FEATURING: Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? (1966), Mr. Freedom (1969), Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther (1970), Muhammad Ali, the Greatest (1974)*, The Model Couple (1977)

HOLLYWOOD HITS

Diabolical psychosexual machinations corrupt the halls of a rich-kid Manhattan prep school in one of the most daring teen movies of the 1990s.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

A cinematic revolution flowers in Sudan as a quartet of veteran filmmakers attempt to establish an outdoor movie theater free from state censorship.

A hallucinatory coming-of-age nightmare unfolds as an isolated teenager loses herself in the disturbing digital void of an online role-playing game.

ANIME

Two young women forge a bond while battling alien insects in this exhilarating—and disarmingly poignant—space opera from the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

DOCUMENTARIES

Renowned documentarian Errol Morris faces off with one of the most controversial political figures of our time: right-wing firebrand Steve Bannon.

Join legendary film producer Jeremy Thomas (The Last Emperor) on a road trip through rural France as he looks back on a life lived in the name of boundary-pushing cinema.

SHORT FILMS

The aesthetically dynamic, shape-shifting films of artist and filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary combine everything from heavily processed 16 mm archival materials to TikTok videos and woman-on-the-street-style interviews to put Black women and their lived experiences, past and present, in dialogue with one another. Drawing inspiration from Gary’s personal heroes like Toni Morrison and Nina Simone—footage of both of whom she poignantly incorporates into her works—her films are as optically imaginative as they are politically and intellectually rigorous, exploring ideas around care, connectivity, and memory through an intimate, Black feminist lens.

FEATURING: An Ecstatic Experience (2015), The Giverny Document (2019), Quiet as It’s Kept (2023)

Nominated for a 2026 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film

The awe-inspiring majesty of the cosmos is captured through the eyes of three wandering donkeys in this sublimely cinematic, Oscar-nominated documentary short.

Discover the untold story behind the synth-pop anthem that took American culture by storm and became the sound of ’80s excess.

MUSIC FILMS

The legendary Velvet Underground frontman revisits his concept-album masterpiece in a soul-shaking live performance filmed by Julian Schnabel.

By imagining an ideal creature cut to the measure of her creator’s desire, the Pygmalion myth vents a dissatisfaction with women as they are. It rehearses a desperate wish for a manufactured femininity that would be eminently malleable and externally authored. Is this not what we find littered throughout film history, not only in movies such as Vertigo (1958), My Fair Lady (1964), and Pretty Woman (1990), which thematize the allure of soft putty, but also in the dynamics between male directors and female performers that have shaped so many productions? An actress’s name, clothing, accent, hair color, body shape, even her face: everything about her can be made over to suit given specifications. She must submit to the master’s will—at least until she is deemed too old and is thrown on the scrap heap. She is not just putty, but pawn and puppet.

In Romy: Anatomy of a Face (1967), Syberberg follows the twenty-seven-year-old Romy Schneider on a ski holiday in Austria, intercutting these alpine episodes with a range of other materials, including archival footage and glimpses of the shoot of La voleuse (1966), a film scripted by Marguerite Duras in which Schneider stars opposite Michel Piccoli as a woman who kidnaps a child she had previously put up for adoption. An early, made-for-television work by a director best known for the monumental Hitler: A Film from Germany (1977), Romy is modest in scale, drawing close to a star who was in the midst of reinventing herself as a performer of great psychological complexity after coming to fame in the midfifties for her repeated portrayal of Sissi, Empress of Austria, in costume dramas. “I was the princess for seven years, but one day I didn’t want to be her anymore,” says Schneider. She hisses that she hates the “star system,” a term she contemptuously relays in English, and says she has lost ambition. Often, she appears moody, diffident. The face she presents is seemingly clear of makeup and subtly traversed by internal turbulence, contrasting sharply with the frozen glamour of the magazine spreads from which Syberberg samples. The veil has been lifted. Yet it would be wrong to presume that Romy delivers unvarnished truth in place of mediatized falsity. Schneider cannily takes advantage of the offstage ambiance to cement the new star image she was constructing at the time, serving up all the anomie and vulnerability expected of a serious modern actress.

Of all the films in the program, Seyrig’s Be Pretty and Shut Up! (filmed in the midseventies and released in 1981) most clearly indicts the Pygmalion paradigm. What had in Romy: Anatomy of a Face registered as a simmering recalcitrance toward industry norms here comes to a boil, heated up by the white-hot flame of feminist consciousness. Fresh from her turn as the murderous title character of Chantal Akerman’s landmark Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), Seyrig embraced the flexible medium of video, working with Carole Roussopoulos and Ioana Wieder as part of the collective Les Insoumuses—a group whose name is an untranslatable play on the notion of being muses who are insoumises, which is to say, disobedient or rebellious. In this tape, which borrows its name from a 1958 Marc Allégret comedy, Seyrig speaks with twenty-four actresses in Paris and Los Angeles about their experiences in the industry, including Juliette Berto, Ellen Burstyn, Jane Fonda, Maria Schneider, and Anne Wiazemsky. The paradigm here is that of the consciousness-raising group, a staple format of second-wave feminism in which women were encouraged to speak openly about their experiences, not out of a spirit of individual confession, but to arrive at an understanding of how what seems personal is in fact a shared product of structural conditions. Be Pretty and Shut Up! uses montage to create a choral ensemble in which women voice a common experience of alienation, from themselves and from other women. Many speak of inescapable stereotypes, limited opportunity, and competition, notably doing so from the heart of a decade in which immense transformations were underway, both in the cinema and in society at large. The irreverence that informs other tapes by the Insoumuses, such as Maso and Miso Go Boating (1976) and S.C.U.M. Manifesto 1967 (1976) is not present here; rather, Seyrig is a sincere and compassionate witness, crafting a composite portrait of a gendered condition. If only so much of it didn’t sound so familiar still today.

The English-language title of Fassbinder’s Women (2000), Rosa von Praunheim’s latitudinal study of the people surrounding the infamously tempestuous director, captures little of the saucy attitude of the German: Für mich gab’s nur noch Fassbinder: Die glücklichen Opfer des Rainer Werner F., or, “For Me, There Was Only Fassbinder: The Happy Victims of Rainer Werner F.” Like Be Pretty and Shut Up!, the film gathers a plurality of voices to reflect on a shared experience, in this case what it was like to be in the orbit of the prolific filmmaker who passed away in 1982 at only thirty-seven. Yet here, rather than the justified grievances aired in Seyrig’s video, what surfaces is a psycho-socio-sexual tangle shot through with ambivalence—and a twinge of nostalgia. In a 1993 interview, von Praunheim admitted that he never liked Fassbinder and felt competitive toward him as a fellow gay filmmaker working independently in West Germany. Von Praunheim said that although he found Fassbinder’s films “relatively boring,” he was fascinated by the man’s life because “he was mean-spirited and sadistic toward his coworkers, and they let themselves be tortured by him. He was the driven, ugly man seeking to build self-esteem through sadomasochism.” Cozy collectivity this wasn’t. Hearing about all this decades later is the gossipy delight of this documentary, in which being one of Fassbinder’s “women,” it turns out, has little to do with one’s gender. It is all a matter of power, and that power is exerted differentially on the various members of the gang. In line with RWF’s predilection for giving male collaborators feminine nicknames, von Praunheim interviews not just figures like Irm Hermann, Hanna Schygulla, and Brigitta Mira, but also Peer Raben and Harry Baer (a.k.a. “Isla”). As a chronicle of a scene that—I beg to differ, Rosa—produced some of the best films ever made, Fassbinder’s Women is not entirely devoid of reverence but does put some pressure on the lionization of the great auteur through its attentiveness to the contributions of his various “happy victims.” Fassbinder might have been the Führer, as Doris Mattes calls him, but in cinema as in politics, every leader needs a supporting team.

Von Praunheim, who passed away on December 17, 2025, at the age of eighty-three after making more than 150 films, possessed an unflagging energy for documenting queer subculture. His earlier film Tally Brown, New York (1979) offers a superlative portrait of the titular performer, a woman he knows is a star and treats like a star, despite—or perhaps because—most people have never heard of her. A demimonde diva who performed on Broadway, appeared in Andy Warhol and Gregory Markopoulos’s films, and sang at the Continental Baths, Brown says she found her first appreciative audience with “old strippers and young sailors.” Von Praunheim roams around New York, filming her performances and giving her the chance to tell her life story in voice-over, as images of her beloved metropolis cascade by. All powdered and zaftig, with a coarseness that somehow matches her poise, Brown is not unlike the sequin-bedecked character of Kenneth Anger’s Puce Moment (1949), aged by three decades. But where Anger’s starlet was silent, what a voice Tally has, whether singing or talking. She is a force to be contained by no one, not to mention a lens through which a vision of an entire city, now vanished, comes into view.

Palling around with Taylor Mead and Divine, singing David Bowie and Kurt Weill, enjoying her femininity like a drag masquerade, Tally has none of the aboveground success of the protagonist of the program’s fifth film. Near the start of All by Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story (1982), we see the singer and actress attending the inaugural ball for Ronald Reagan—an event the film juxtaposes with the New York Times’ revelation in 1975 that Kitt had been subject to surveillance by the CIA owing to her criticism of the war in Vietnam. Both Kitt and Brown, however, are singer-survivors, and both films alternate between onstage and backstage, between two kinds of performance: one for the public, the other for the documentarian, both in the twilight of the women’s careers. In Be Pretty and Shut Up!, most of the actresses have not yet passed into the ripeness of age. It is something they fear, foreseeing a moment when the prejudices of the industry will bear down on them with an even greater weight. Brown and Kitt, by contrast, appear in these films after they have crossed the Rubicon of fifty. All by Myself depicts its subject with great pathos but no pity. The resilience that echoes through the lyrics of Kitt’s songs seeps into her offstage persona, as she embraces challenges and refuses compromise. Rather than using its access to Kitt to frame her as an everywoman—as if to say, “Stars, they’re just like us!”—Blackwood’s film finds a perhaps unexpected kinship with von Praunheim’s portrait of Tally Brown, in that both refuse to reduce an exceptional personality to the banality of the relatable. They say instead: just look at how fascinating she is.

In her recent criticism collection The Hunger: Film Writing, 2012–2024, Anderson writes that Boyd McDonald’s notion that “motion pictures are for people who like to watch women” is for her “the purest, simplest distillation of cinephilia—or at least one strain of it, mine especially.” This kind of visual pleasure is emphatically not what Laura Mulvey had in mind when she proposed that classical Hollywood was marked by a male gaze. It is, however, the kind of queer, feminist pleasure that drips from these five films, a pleasure inextricable from their affirmation of what one might call Galatea’s unruly obstinacy. Ivory, the substance from which she was initially made, is harder than bone, after all. Actresses Unfiltered brings together works of meta-cinema that look closely at female performance, outside the forms of directorial control that often prevail in fiction filmmaking. In so doing, they tutor the viewer in a way of looking, offering an optic through which more women and more movies deserve to be seen.

But it isn’t Anna who dies. In the virtuosic, nearly monochromatic four-minute sequence that follows Sean’s hyperconfident assertion, he runs through a snowy Central Park. The soundtrack is sprightly strings, which become swoony and unsettlingly insistent (the orchestral score was one of the first for an English-language feature by the now highly acclaimed film composer Alexandre Desplat). A hooded figure all in black, the man appears as a negative space cut into the frame, a dominating absence. The camera follows him as he vanishes under a bridge. We see him emerge, and then the title appears: Birth, in a curlicued Old Hollywood font.

Now we are in front of the man, drawing away from him as he runs into the curved aperture of another tunnel, irresistibly reminiscent of a birth canal. As the camera pulls away further into the darkness, the man collapses, dropping to the ground and lying motionless. The camera continues its inexorable withdrawal. We both hear and see snow falling, and then cut to the dazzling confusion of a baby being born, emerging slick from its mother’s thighs, its arching body seen through water. The pulsing strings yoke these disparate sections together as a single narrative.

What we have seen are the two doorways of life, one leading out and the other leading in. They are the frames to a mystery we all participate in, mostly ignorant, often incurious or guided by preformed myths. Birth is about this mystery, and is itself fitted together in a mysterious, elliptical way that doesn’t offer easy conclusions. After the prelude of Sean’s death, it steps forward a decade to tell the story of his widow, Anna, and what happens when an inscrutable ten-year-old boy shows up at her door, insisting he is Sean.

Anna, played by Nicole Kidman, is manifestly not okay. She wears drab, unflattering clothes, and her shorn, nunlike head is a symbol of her withdrawal from the world in the wake of loss. Her marked resemblance to Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby might serve as a warning of the isolation and potential danger lurking in the rarefied upper echelons of Manhattan where Birth takes place. Anna lives in a large, gloomy apartment with her frosty matriarch mother, played by a deadpan Lauren Bacall, and a supporting cast of family and staff who serve as an opera-style chorus. On the day the film begins, she is about to celebrate her engagement to the darkly handsome Joseph (Danny Huston). It is obvious that he is an inadequate substitute for Sean.

Into this unstable scenario steps the new Sean, pudgy and unsmiling, played with astonishing conviction by Cameron Bright. He’s a disrupter, spooky in his assertions, potentially malevolent in his unchildlike implacability. “What do you want?” Anna asks him, and he leans against the kitchen door and replies with frightening confidence: “You. You’re my wife.” She smiles, baffled, and he adds the kicker. “It’s me, Sean.” From that moment on, Anna is bewitched, tumbling between doubt and desperation, longing and relief.

Kidman is highly skilled at conveying this extreme emotional lability. In one of the most lauded sequences, Anna is dressing for the opera when she has another disturbing encounter with Sean. She crouches to his level and tells him he is hurting her, that he has to stop bothering her. Her eyes glow. As she walks to the door, he collapses, his fall accompanied by the hounding strings of the prologue to Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, music that is about submission to fate. She and Joseph arrive late to the opera and shuffle to their seats. While the music gathers in intensity, Harris Savides’s camera swoops toward her face, hunting out a paroxysm of feeling as her features oscillate between hope, confusion, excitement, and abandon. As in the film’s prelude, the overlapping or bleeding through of music between scenes is crucial to the emotional effect, which itself resembles a spell.

Much has been made over the years—particularly during the film’s all-too-dismissive initial reception—about the queasy premise of a child and an adult locked together in a quasi-romantic bond. Anna asks whether Sean can satisfy her, allows him to climb seemingly naked into a bathtub with her, kisses him, and eventually decides that they will run away together and marry when he is twenty-one. “How are you going to fulfill my needs?” she inquires. “You ready for that? You ever made love to a girl?”

All this is disturbing to watch, particularly the spectacle of Sean’s chubby exposed body as he undresses for the bath (Glazer has called this scene “the sharp end of the film . . . the razor’s edge”). But the film constantly destabilizes any literal reading, slipping away from realism into fairy tale or fable. There is the lingering possibility that this taciturn boy with his disquieting stare is either engaged in a con or truly the adult Sean. But Birth has very little in common with adult-child body-swap comedies like Big or Freaky Friday. It’s deeply concerned with irrationality and isolation, and in cinematic terms its closest influence is undoubtedly Stanley Kubrick.

In its glacial elegance and control, as well as its claustrophobic scrutiny on unraveling psyches, Birth recalls by turns Lolita, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. Take the shots of the wrecked apartment after Joseph has attacked Sean, the last lingering on a piano rammed unnaturally into a wall. Here Glazer deploys the language of horror, of Shining-style poltergeist or paranormal activity, to convey extremes of irrational emotion in a tightly controlled world. As in all of Glazer’s films, sound, too, creates a counternarrative, giving vent to feelings that are otherwise suppressed.

Ironically, Birth had a difficult birth. Glazer began his career directing advertisements and music videos, before making his acclaimed feature debut, the stylish gangster film Sexy Beast, in 2000. He originally intended to follow it with Under the Skin, a very loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel. Instead, he became captivated by the fairy-tale strangeness of Birth. Under the Skin had to wait another thirteen years to be completed.

Glazer is famous for the time he dedicates to each film (his 2023 film, The Zone of Interest, was a ten-year project). He worked on the script of Birth for years with two screenwriters, Milo Addica and the late Jean-Claude Carrière, the legendary French writer and Luis Buñuel collaborator whose credits include The Tin Drum and Belle de jour. There were multiple changes of direction, including a last-minute shift of focus from the boy to the grieving widow, made mere weeks before filming began. Scripts were often delivered the night before shooting a scene, and the edit was protracted.

For me, one of the most interesting elements of the final construction is how effectively the film undoes itself. It is almost perversely keen to dismantle its own illusions, to confess its secrets and lay its workings bare. This makes it an entirely different film both in retrospect and on a second viewing (which makes this a good place to pause if you are reading prior to a first viewing).

The possibility that young Sean really is a reincarnation is shattered by that most classic literary device, a cache of letters. To understand how this works, we need to return to Anna’s engagement party, toward the beginning of the film. A couple, played by Peter Stormare and Anne Heche, arrive in the lobby. The man, Clifford, goes up in the elevator, while the woman, Clara, makes a flimsy excuse about a missing ribbon, before running into Central Park and burying a package under dead leaves.

Clifford, it transpires, was Sean’s best friend. In another of Kidman’s extraordinarily quicksilver scenes, Anna visits him to describe Sean’s return and beg for his help. Clara arrives late to a subsequent meeting that Anna and Clifford have arranged at Anna’s apartment, and takes young Sean into the bathroom for a strangely seductive interchange, in which she points out her dirty hands before writing her address on his wrist.

Later, in her flat, she informs the startled boy that she was Sean’s lover, his mistress. The parcel that she buried in Central Park was a box of love letters written by Anna to Sean, who had passed them to Clara unopened as a way of demonstrating which woman he loved best. It is from these letters that Sean has been constructing his false identity. They are the source of his eerie accumulation of knowledge. The proof is right there in his backpack.

One of the ways in which Sean’s status is made constantly ambiguous, even at this moment of seemingly total revelation, is that no adult treats him like a child. This includes his mother, who engages in forlorn bedtime role-play, pretending he is the captain of a ship, only to be dismissed when Sean says coldly: “I’m not your stupid son anymore.” Though Clara is certain Sean is not her former lover, she still taunts and physically attacks him. No adult cares for him reliably as a child. Even Anna can’t disengage from her own fantasy of love restored for long enough to wash his filthy face.

With young Sean unmasked as an impostor, I want to pause a moment on what this revelation means for Anna. The man she has been grieving for ten years was not, to put it mildly, worthy of her devotion. Their world-class romance (“We got married thirty times . . . thirty churches in thirty days”) collapses in on itself. She is in thrall to fantasy twice over, in that she has fallen in love with a false reincarnation of someone who was actively betraying her.

“A man has to support his wife,” she had said earlier to young Sean. “He has to feed her, defend her, take care of her. How are you going to feed me, defend me, take care of me? How are you going to do that?” Leaving aside the sexual politics, this is a pretty infantilizing view of marriage, its childishness underscored not only by Kidman’s breathy Marilyn voice but also by the fact that she and Sean are slurping up an ice-cream sundae.

In a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose (included in this release), Kidman described the state of unstoppable free fall her character was in. Falling in love represents a collapse of ego boundaries, faced with the beguiling, terrifying prospect of no longer being alone. Generally, or at least hopefully, we move on from this dangerous state into something more weathered, realistic, and mature. I don’t think it’s pushing too far, considering the fate of Anna’s love letters, to suggest that Birth regards the act of falling in love as frighteningly irrational, and is interested in the devastations to the self that can result from love’s excess as well as its lack.

Savides’s camera often catches people in scenes of abject isolation. Sean stands on a swing in a deserted playground at night; Joseph unpacks his suitcase in an empty house; Anna is lost in a crowd of people. If this is a horror story, it’s a horror story about being desperate for love, and about the vulnerability, loneliness, and difficulty in understanding other people that might drive this state—also major themes in Glazer’s next film, Under the Skin.

Anna’s eventual marriage to Joseph is hardly presented as a happy conclusion, as she runs in her white dress into a churning gray sea. Color has not returned to her world. But then there is the boy, who smiles for the very first time in his final shot, undoing the disquieting spell of his face. He protects Anna to the last, never revealing what he knows. “See you in the next life,” he says. Any analysis of Birth only opens up a deeper register of mystery. What was it between these two lonely people, if it wasn’t love?

Manuel Puig had been turning down offers to film his wildly original novel Kiss of the Spider Woman for nearly a decade. One of the stars of the Latin American Boom—the sixties and seventies movement that remixed the codes of literature, updating realism, pop culture, and narrative strategies—Puig was a lifelong cinephile. He had haunted movie theaters with his mother in his native Argentina, submerging his own gay desires in fantasies of the silver screen from an early age. All grown up, he enrolled in Rome’s legendary Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (founded by Benito Mussolini’s government in 1935), where a generation of Latin American filmmakers, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Fernando Birri, studied. In the end, although he turned to literature instead of cinema, his novels always gestured to the movies; it’s no coincidence, then, that Spider Woman is centered on fantastical films conjured inside a prison cell to free the spirits within. Henceforth, Puig would make his films with words.

Puig’s novel is set in Buenos Aires in 1975, after both Puig and the Argentine-born Babenco had left the country; the period was one of growing government repression and political unrest. It was published in 1976, the year that Argentina’s government was taken over by a military junta that initiated years of dictatorship, brutal restrictions, and the disappearance of around thirty thousand Argentines. It provides, as Uruguayan novelist Caro De Robertis has put it, “a deeply incisive rendering of the mechanics of surveillance and repression” that would grip the country until 1983. (And the region: Latin America was engulfed, dominated by dictatorships and military coups that stayed in power in Brazil and Uruguay, for example, until 1985, and in Chile until 1990.)

Having dropped out of high school in Argentina, worked in Spain’s film industry, then settled permanently in São Paulo, Babenco was an established Brazilian filmmaker when Pixote, his riveting 1980 portrait of a city kid’s gritty life with a violent street gang, was released. For his next project, he wanted to direct an adaptation of Puig’s novel, and it was in part as a result of the breakout success of Pixote that Kiss of the Spider Woman came together as an independent, thoroughly international production. In early 1982, Babenco was in Los Angeles to accept an award and gave actor Burt Lancaster a copy of the book; Lancaster loved it and agreed to play Molina. Around the same time, the American producer David Weisman visited Rio de Janeiro, where he had previously lived, to meet Babenco and other Brazilian filmmakers whose work he admired, meetings that Fabiano Canosa of New York City’s Public Theater, a champion of Brazilian film in the United States, assisted in arranging. Weisman helped convince Puig, who was living in Mexico, to grant Babenco the adaptation rights, and enlisted American screenwriter Leonard Schrader to contribute the script. Actor Raul Julia, who was also closely involved with the Public Theater, came on board, and so did Julia’s fellow New York actor William Hurt, after Lancaster had to drop out. After encountering Brazilian actor Sônia Braga (a friend of Canosa’s) on a plane, Babenco cast her in the film, which was shot and largely financed in Brazil.

Free of specific chronology, Spider Woman is set in a Brazilianesque but indeterminate Latin America of generalized political repression, torture, and violence, all of which plays out within the film itself: inside the prison, in flashbacks to the characters’ lives outside, and tragically, at the end, in the bloody streets. It recreates the past from which Brazil was just at that moment emerging. But consider, too, the United States in 1985, the year of the film’s release: politically, the country was in the middle of the Reagan-Bush presidencies; sexually, post-1970s gay pride was being shattered by the AIDS epidemic and censorship fights; culturally, it was a time of immense invention and public support. Joseph Papp, the founder of the Public, was a shining beacon, championing artists and bringing theater to new communities; in 1984, he went to Rio for the revival of its film festival. It was a joyous occasion: the reopening of the festival announced the return of a constitutional government; Braga was there to celebrate, along with most of the Brazilian film world, dancing samba in a late-night favela celebration. I was there, too, and thanks to Canosa, who organized the festival, met Papp, Braga, and musician and future politician Gilberto Gil, along with Babenco (through Tom Luddy of the Telluride Film Festival), who, in retrospect, must have been in postproduction at the time.

In Spider Woman, glamour and gossip are the essential stuff of political/sexual transformation; they cast their spell on the film’s characters, as on its audience, and all succumb. It was unprecedented in its fusion of a radical politics of sex with a sexual politics of revolution, through the ever-present medium of cinema, which Babenco ingeniously stages through doubling, as the movie itself splits into two parts, its imaginary film (the adaptation retains in its entirety just one of the five films narrated by Molina in the novel) providing the glamour that its realist prison narrative lacks.

At the center are two unlikely cellmates; Valentin Arregui (Julia), a profoundly heterosexual Marxist radical, and Luis Molina (Hurt), a movie-mad gay window dresser. Valentin, caught smuggling a passport to a fleeing professor, has been tortured in captivity; he is torn between a “movement girlfriend” and an upper-class lover. Molina, who lived with his mother before being arrested for “corrupting minors,” passes the time by retelling for his cellmate the plot of a movie he loves, like a flamboyant spider spinning a narrative web. Spider Woman is set almost entirely within their cell, with the occasional saunter through the prison when Molina is summoned to the warden’s office, revealing a sideline as a mole. The cell, however, is crucially enlarged, through flashbacks along with visualizations of the characters’ fantasies and of the melodramatic movie brought to life by Molina’s narration. Starring Braga as its femme fatale, the film within the film is a piece of Nazi propaganda, a World War II–era romantic thriller—the kind of movie that Puig, very possibly, once viewed with his own mother at the matinee screenings they frequented.

Spider Woman was an all-star endeavor. Babenco and Puig were already renowned, as was their cast. At the time of filming, Hurt was a new star, with raves for Altered States (1980), Body Heat (1981), and The Big Chill (1983). He would go on to win an Oscar for this performance as Molina, the outrageous queen obsessed with glamour and make-believe. A formula was thus set in place: live straight, act gay, win an Oscar. Julia was an established presence in the New York theater world, and would soon have pop-culture fame thanks to his starring role as Gomez in two Addams Family films. He also became a recognized political figure, much beloved as a cultural force both in his native Puerto Rico, as a pro-independence voice, and in New York, as a Latino activist; he was even recognized in El Salvador with an award for his activism (while there, he paid a visit to the grave of the martyred Archbishop Óscar Romero).

Finally, Braga was the perfect choice for the femme fatale in the movie of Molina’s recollection—as the fictitious actor Leni Lamaison (a name with a sly nod to Leni Riefenstahl, but here exposed as a full Nazi), she plays the enigmatic Spider Woman—as well as for the role of Valentin’s own beloved. She becomes the embodiment of his secret true love, Marta, the bourgeois woman from whom he parted for political reasons. Braga was already famous for her starring role in Bruno Barreto’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976). Soon after Spider Woman, she would star in Robert Redford’s The Milagro Beanfield War, released in 1988. (The two were a couple for a few years, leading to a marked increase in the Latin American film presence at the Sundance Film Festival.) Many other films would follow, and she achieved new fame in her starring role as an elder activist in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s 2016 anti-gentrification fable, Aquarius.

The imaginary and, thanks to Babenco, fully realized film within the film offers an escape not only from Spider Woman’s harshly realist prison walls but from the imprisoned country outside. And it serves another function as well: as an object lesson in how to free the mind when the body cannot escape. Of course, the narrated fantasies offer an escape for the viewer too: a luxurious black-and-white detour into a realm of fantasy and eroticism, complete with plush sets and the incomparably seductive Braga.

At first, the campiness of Hurt’s Molina may be hard to accept today. Babenco was filming a decade and a half after William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band made a hit out of swishy stereotypes that were criticized as dated even in 1970. Similarly, in today’s decidedly postrevolutionary era of repressive consolidation and lockstep correctness, Julia’s Valentin may strike audiences as hopelessly retrograde, a cardboard revolutionary out of step with contemporary ideas. Even the imaginary film that intervenes might seem old-fashioned in its notion of cinematic glamour, with Braga’s performance so over-the-top that she must be in on the joke.

But such judgments of Spider Woman would miss the point: that is, all of the characters and narrative threads of the film are themselves exercises in camp. Every single one. Julia camps it up as the homophobic, heterosexual failed revolutionary, all bruised ego and grandiose self-regard. Hurt has an easier task in camping up the collaborator, performing him with swish and swagger as a flamboyant gay man of the old school, while successfully meeting the challenge of making him relatable and lovable. Braga may have the hardest assignment: to camp up glamour and thus send up her own image, drawing a line between authentic screen presence and preening vanity. Even the warden and assistant warden exceed their roles and tip over into cartoons. And the revolutionary pals of Valentin turn into tragically camp versions of their idealized selves, misreading the cues to deliver catastrophe. Spider Woman trusts its audience to learn the glossary and parse the lexicon, adjusting accordingly.

Perhaps it’s the ultimate revenge of Puig and Babenco against the authoritarian governments that sent both abroad: to make fun of the jailer, to empower the jailed with transformative fantasies, and to envision a life that rewards, if only posthumously, those brave enough to step outside their assigned (cinematic) roles. Thus does the film take its audience on a journey from skepticism to belief, as its spell increasingly takes hold. By the end, Valentin and Molina have traded places: one, near death but rewarded by morphine and fantasy, reunites with his true love, while the other, radicalized by love reciprocated, makes the ultimate sacrifice and leaves fantasy—and mother, and cinema, and life itself—behind forever.

In a sense, Spider Woman’s narrative arc advances the idea that melodrama can trump history, that wishing can make it so, and that radicalism of the imagination can occasionally—under the right circumstances—overcome sexual and political impediments, even hostilities, to switch sides. (In the mood for love, indeed: Hong Kong’s grand master Wong Kar Wai has recounted that he chose to shoot 1997’s Happy Together in Buenos Aires because he was so inspired by Puig.)

Babenco himself never quite left the prison world and its conflicting values behind. Years later, in 2003, he made another prison film, Carandiru, that is far more violent and pessimistic. Without the fantasies, the later movie’s realities are much harsher. The exception to the overwhelming brutality of penal violence is a gay couple, who focus the contradictory forces of love and repression into a tiny ray of hope, inspiring a visiting prison doctor (based on the real-life Dr. Drauzio Varella, whose memoir was the basis for the script). Carandiru, set in a mid-AIDS, post-dictatorship Brazilian prison, is a study of brutality and diminished humanity. But not completely: as always with Babenco, love shows up.

Kiss of the Spider Woman was a resounding critical and popular success: Hurt’s performance won the top award at the Cannes Film Festival as well as the Oscar, and the movie received three additional Oscar nominations (Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture). It broke records when it opened in theaters in the summer of 1985, and it appeared on many critics’ lists of the best films of the year. Its rerelease is a powerful reminder that, for a brief, magical period, a cultural moment infused with literature, film, and egalitarian values was able to flourish to a dizzying degree, despite the many political forces aligned against it. And now, as it turns out, is the most perfect time for such a revival of hope and fantasy. Puig and Babenco were exquisitely tuned to the stakes of their moment; shaped by their cultures, they carried them along into parallel exiles, sharing wisdom and inspiration when they were needed so sorely—as, indeed, they are once again in our moment. Viva Manuel Puig! Viva Héctor Babenco!

Here as elsewhere, writer-director Reginald Hudlin’s feature-film debut—also that of leads Christopher “Kid” Reid and Christopher “Play” Martin—does not overly concern itself with informing the audience. It may seem antithetical, but this lack of unnecessary minutiae actually makes the film more realistic. While a simple, quick-witted quip from Kid in this penultimate scene might have served as a subversive critique of the criminal justice system, such a scripted piece of performative social commentary was unnecessary. House Party’s core audience didn’t need dialogue from the desk sergeant to know what Kid has been charged with. There is a reason why Hudlin did not waste time scripting words for Kid or his motley crew of compadres upon his release from police custody:

House Party is a documentary.

While the nation’s most iconic works of visual art authentically document an element of this country’s cultural ethos, they are often fictional. The Founding Fathers’ big house party memorialized in John Trumbull’s famous oil-on-canvas Declaration of Independence never actually occurred. The stern-faced farming husband and wife who look like they invented green-bean casserole in American Gothic were actually a dentist and an art teacher. Not only were these models not a married couple, but painter Grant Wood said he chose them because they looked like “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.” Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 portrait of George Washington, posed like Captain Morgan while crossing the Delaware with an American flag, is as accurate as a painting of blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus. Unlike House Party, the idyllic Americas depicted in such creative masterpieces share one common element:

Black people do not exist.

House Party, conversely, manages to paint a more perfect picture without sacrificing authenticity for romanticized mythology. Based on the short film that served as Hudlin’s Harvard senior thesis, the film is set in a quintessentially American, authentically Black community filled with fully realized people who exist not as spectacle but as reality. Moreover, for the people whose lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness were documented on-screen, this classic proved just as iconic as George Washington’s windswept, star-spangled banner or the figures who became avatars for the spirit of rugged individualism by cosplaying pastoral peasants.

Before rap music emerged as the most influential and financially lucrative genre on the planet, the billion-dollar corporations that controlled the mainstream media doubted that a movie centered on hip-hop could even turn a profit. In pre–House Party Hollywood, “Black movie” was synonymous with “limited appeal.” The few “urban” movies that did receive a green light were given low budgets. Back then, the new niche culture was considered so dangerous that some moviegoers had to watch House Party in fully lit theaters because some venues refused to dim the lights. (To be fair, in the 1980s, behavioral psychologists believed dimmer switches were the only thing preventing Black teenagers from bursting into random acts of thuggery.) By the end of its first week in theaters, Hudlin’s film had earned double New Line Cinema’s paltry $2.5 million investment, audiences across the country had fallen in love with House Party, and Hollywood suddenly realized that Black movies . . .

Okay, Hollywood hasn’t changed much, but still.

Like most great works of art, Hudlin’s not-so-still life is simultaneously original and familiar. Informed by his upbringing in East St. Louis, Illinois—one of many Black Americas once invisible in classic Hollywood cinema—the film’s people and places might be fictional, but they represent something recognizable and three-dimensional. When Play mentions that his parents went “down south” to visit South Carolina, real people with real histories can infer that Play is likely descended from formerly enslaved people who migrated to the area where this film takes place. Still, the film never explicitly reveals its geographic setting. There’s no on-screen caption announcing a city, no shot of a skyline to anchor the narrative in a specific place. And yet, for anyone with a discerning eye, the location is unmistakable. The story takes place in an overpoliced neighborhood where white law enforcement officers are known for harassing residents. In 1990, the year House Party was released, Black men were three times more likely than white men to be killed by law enforcement. Over thirty years later, the ratio remains the same: three to one. But House Party is not just a story about policing. It’s also a portrait of a community where the schools and jails reflect the same demographics, where a high-school cafeteria is just as Black as a cellblock. In 1990, two-thirds of Black students attended predominantly minority schools. Today, that number has increased to 84 percent.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the film is its portrayal of socioeconomic fluidity within Black neighborhoods. House Party is not set in a mythical African American locale where well-meaning white saviors, played by Michelle Pfeiffer or Sandra Bullock, swoop in to rescue preternaturally gifted but “troubled” Black youth from becoming gangbangers and teenage mothers. Instead, the film’s characters live in a real place, where entrepreneurs live next door to garbagemen, and where teachers share streets with short-order cooks. The trope of “the hood” as a prison from which only the most successful Black people can escape exists solely in the white imagination. In reality, Black children feel less safe in white neighborhoods. For them, messianic figures or tired tropes are less important than gathering with a few friends trying to dance, flirt, and avoid their parents for a night. There’s only one place where someone like Kid’s love interest, Sidney (Tisha Campbell), the middle-class daughter of a successful entrepreneur, can walk to visit her friend Sharane (AJ Johnson), who lives in the housing projects a few blocks away:

A place called “Black America.”

No character embodies this reality better than Kid’s father, Pop, played brilliantly by the late Robin Harris. In one of his final performances before his untimely death, Harris brings to life a man who is equal parts hilarious, exasperated, and real. For anyone raised to appreciate the poetic brilliance of Dolemite or the gospel of Black fatherhood, a man whose only mission is to give his son a better life is instantly recognizable. Pop is not wealthy. His job title is never revealed. And yet everyone who has ever been told to keep their mind “on them books and off them gals” knows the people for whom Pop works:

Them white folks.

But Pop is more than comic relief. He is the moral compass of the film, the last vestige of authority in a world temporarily liberated by youthful exuberance and music. He doesn’t hover like a helicopter parent or deliver long monologues imparting life lessons. He simply enforces the rules of the Black cinematic universe that every Black child knows instinctively. Sidney doesn’t need a long explanation when Kid says he’s “on punishment.” She understands that Pop is no different from the parents she had to bamboozle to attend Play’s bash.

That’s why the music stops and the kids collectively snap back to reality when a Black father shows up at Play’s party. In a parent-free, quasi-fictional world without visible teachers, truant officers, or PTA meetings, Pop is the last line of defense between community and chaos. He commands respect not because he demands it, but because he embodies the rules these kids have been raised to respect.

Being a Black protagonist in classical Hollywood cinema often comes with the burden of proving one’s social value or displaying unimpeachable moral integrity. But because House Party is unencumbered by the blinding light of the white gaze, the audience doesn’t need to know if Kid is a straight-A student or how often he attends church. In the world where House Party takes place, Kid is allowed to be a flawed, imperfect, fully human teenager—worthy of redemption and the audience’s grace—simply because he’s seen as what he is: a human being.

While Stab and his crew (played by members of the legendary music group Full Force) might appear to be the film’s antagonists, they’re less villains than distorted, inverted reflections of Kid, Play, and their friend Bilal (Martin Lawrence). Stab (the Legend Paul Anthony) uses brute force as easily as Play weaponizes his charisma. Zilla (B-Fine), like Kid, is the awkward, less charming sidekick. Pee-Wee (Bowlegged Lou), high-pitched and unpredictable, is similar to Bilal. Stab and his crew are not evil; they’re familiar. And like everyone else in this patchwork quilt of a neighborhood, they belong. They are part of the same fragile ecosystem held together by community and proximity.

The true antagonist of House Party is America.

If House Party takes place in a Black America governed by rules, respect, and community, then America is its adversary. It makes more mischief than the mischief-makers and outbullies the bullies. It is an invader of safe spaces whose allegations are not worthy of being articulated. America does not protect Black communities or serve its residents; it enforces. It is the unseen force whose agents disrespect the people who most deserve dignity. America is the opposite of Black joy.

But House Party is not a story about defeat or the America that devours. It was one of the first films to center hip-hop as part of Black American culture. But it’s not about the genre or “the urban experience”; instead, it is a celebration. It is a movie about Black people who live in a Black community with nerds and aspiring college students and bullies and concerned fathers and rapscallions and Kool-Aid makers and DIY disc jockeys and nosy neighbors and all the sweet and bitter joy and pain and shared knowledge that inspired the ancient African American idiom:

“What’s understood don’t need to be said.”

Somewhere, tonight, a group of young, unextraordinary Black people will seek the safety of a space where this country’s tentacles cannot reach. Perhaps at a cookout or frat party or behind a bedroom door at their cousin’s house. Invariably, someone will perform the same iconic dance routine from House Party. Although they will do the same shuffle and kicks, it is likely that they have never actually seen the film where Reginald Hudlin captured this uniquely Black slice of Americana. Yet, somehow, they understand.

In the penultimate scene of House Party, Kid walks out of a cell packed with Black men. Undaunted by his narrow escape, the teenage embodiment of America’s multiracial coalition turns to find his community awaiting his release. His charismatic, loyal friend Play—whose South Carolinian ancestors’ uprisings, protests, and movements forced America to become a democracy—rises first. Kid’s new sweetheart, whose parents do not work for “them white folks,” stands next. So does the around-the-way girl. Finally, the buddy who has no idea that his basement hobby is about to change the musical universe rises to his feet, finishing the portrait of “the kind of people who live in this house.”

This, too, is an American masterpiece.

Yam daabo (The Choice, 1987) opens on two men working over a mud firepit. Tight close-ups show only their limbs—an arm stoking pieces of charcoal, hands vigorously pumping a dual-air-drum mechanism to intensify the flames. The hearth and fire are central metaphors for life in this Mooré-language film by Burkinabe filmmaker Idrissa Ouédraogo, about a family uprooting themselves from a drought-stricken village of the Sahel to find new possibilities and paths in another region.

In this precredit sequence, before the family departs, a crowd of villagers with empty baskets watches and waits, in a silence interrupted only by the cries of a baby. Mute crowds of spectators are a recurring motif throughout the film: a communal counter-gazing that responds to, reduplicates, and questions the gaze of the camera itself. Suddenly, on the parched dusty road, a bright-red Mack truck appears in the distance, filled with packaged aid goods labeled “United States of America.” The bodies of the villagers, sitting or standing under the searing sun, are all oriented in the direction of the road. Later, they line up patiently in front of the truck, waiting for the theater of humanitarianism to take place. The framing in this tightly edited opening sequence often isolates body parts—an arm, a leg—in tension with the filmmaker’s embrace in the rest of the film of more humanistic framings, which honor characters’ individualities with medium and close shots of carefully lit faces. Rather than serving as a prelude to the narrative of a family that refuses both international assistance and a rootless existence in the cities, electing instead to look for greener pastures elsewhere, this sequence can be read as its antithesis. Ouédraogo presents us with a compendium of images familiar from the colonialist humanitarian scripts that play out on the televisions of the world, only to deconstruct them during the rest of the film by focusing on the depth and humanity of an ordinary family.

Hardly anyone speaks in these first scenes. As the family journeys away from the village, the sparse dialogue revolves entirely around water and the endless quest for this life-sustaining liquid. “Ali, give me some water” is the film’s first spoken sentence, to which the little boy responds: “There is no more water.” The sounds of empty calabashes resonate, as women walk in a sun-scorched, bare landscape. This is a far cry from the laughs, chatter, and loud voices that fill the air in the new place the family settles in, where there is abundant water and vegetation. Freed from the constant threat to their survival, the narrative plot can finally start, one that centers the emotional turmoil of the family members: budding love, grief, rage, friendship, and jealousy. What is sometimes mischaracterized as a love triangle is, more accurately, a conflict between a pair of lovers and a stalker. Bintou, the family’s adolescent daughter, loves Issa. After she rejects Tiga, her close friend’s brother, he escalates into attempted sexual assault and attempted murder.

While not yet using the expensive widescreen format he soon became associated with, Ouédraogo still offers in this early feature, shot on 16 mm, indelible frames of the Sahel’s majestic landscapes. The horizon of the village where the film opens presents only naked, dry branches stretching toward the sky, sounds of aridity everywhere as objects resonate, hollow and dried out. The place where the family resettles is the complete opposite. In an almost mythical new environment, green leaves gorged with sap rustle in the wind, water gently swells against the river bend. There is a kind of magnetic mimetism between the environment and Ouédraogo’s characters, whereby environments able to sustain luxuriant life and growth also become a playground for the protagonists’ emotional exploration and development. In the lush green forest, Bintou and Issa flirt, play hide-and-seek, and merrily splash water at each other. In this cinema of contrasts, the first, arid landscape induced quiet, contemplative moods, while fiery emotions thrive in the verdant land.

Growing up in a rural area of Burkina Faso with parents who were farmers, like a majority of the country’s residents, Ouédraogo (1954–2018) knew intimately the African peasant communities his first films exquisitely and lovingly depicted. Many filmmakers of his generation privileged the city, deprecating “calabash cinema” or “village cinema,” which was accused of conveying tropes of immutable African lifeways, untouched by history. While these concerns responded to the very real and violent ways in which the continent had been represented since the advent of the camera, Ouédraogo’s concern with rural life was grounded in the pragmatic knowledge that most Burkinabes resided outside of cities. The brief urban interlude in Yam daabo is marked by both delight and a shattering tragedy. The soundscape—both diegetic and extradiegetic—turns upbeat when the family arrives in the city, a world of cacophony, shouts, engines, and trendy music. The unnamed city is quite modest, but compared with the village, its flock of buildings, surveyed by an aerial shot, gives a sense of magnitude and scale, while its international connections are advertised by the BICIA bank and the Bata store. All the members of the family get lost in commodity fetishism in the city, the patriarch enthusiastically trying on different hats, and his son, Ali, standing still, fascinated by an ad for Le feu de la vengeance (Fire of Vengeance, 1982), a cheap kung-fu action film by Indonesian director Danu Umbara.

Irreducible to formulaic conflicts between tradition and modernity, rural and city life, Ouédraogo’s protagonists in Yam daabo move between both of these worlds constantly. It is the sale of the donkey and cart in this unnamed city that allows the family to migrate from a region threatened by desertification to a more arable environment. When they arrive in the new land where they decide to settle, in spite of its Edenic landscapes, sounds of gunfire quickly remind us that this is not a space empty of risks either, nor isolated from the larger upheavals that affect the region as a whole.

Yam daabo premiered at the 1987 FESPACO festival (the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou), just months before the assassination of revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso, that October. Ouédraogo’s cinematic training exemplifies the mixture of colonial remnants, international solidarities, Pan-Africanist circuits, and nationalist desires that affected many African filmmakers of his generation. He moved to Ouagadougou—both a national and a Pan-Africanist film capital—to study at the African Institute for Cinema Studies (INAFEC), which, while short-lived, trained over two hundred students from across West Africa between 1976 and 1987, including fellow Burkinabe filmmaker Fanta Régina Nacro. Ouédraogo graduated with a master’s degree from INAFEC in 1981 with a short film, Poko, which was awarded Best Short Film at FESPACO. He worked for the national film production company before entering a brief Soviet period, studying film in Kyiv. Later, he pursued further cinematic studies at the French Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC) as well as the Sorbonne. Between Ouagadougou, Kyiv, and Paris, his trajectory reflects the complex terrains many of his peers also had to navigate. On the one hand, postcolonial governments were trying to harness the nascent local cinema industry to the needs of the nation-state. On the other hand, production and distribution circuits were still dominated by former colonial powers. Added to this was the Cold War context, in which Soviet solidarities helped to fund and train Third Cinema and Pan-Africanist film movements.

Ouédraogo refused to be reduced to one, formulaic type of cinema, and often decried international film critics’ desire to put African cinema into a cage of sorts. His early feature films, based in rural Burkina Faso, using nonprofessional actors and majestic Sahel landscapes, achieved international success: these include Yam daabo (winner of the Georges Sadoul Prize, 1986), Yaaba (Sakura Grand Prix at the 1989 Tokyo International Film Festival; International Film Critics Prize at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival), and Tilaï (Grand Prix at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival). His later works struggled to replicate this acclaim, but in spite of this, Ouédraogo went on to have a prolific and deliberately eclectic career, resisting predetermined molds and constantly experimenting with new genres, new languages, and new themes. Alongside narrative features and short films, he also directed documentaries and television productions. His fifth feature, Samba Traoré (1992), is a Burkina-based thriller, which he followed with Le cri du coeur (1994), a melodrama set in France. In 1997, he made Kini & Adams, his first film shot in English, which is set in Zimbabwe, features a cast of professional South African actors, and embraces that nation’s heritage of anti-apartheid freedom songs and theater. In a 2002 interview with Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, reflecting on the lukewarm international reception of his works not set in rural Burkina Faso, Ouédraogo affirmed, resolutely, “there is not a single African cinema; there must be African cinemas.”

We see elements of that quest for polyphonic modes of expression early in Yam daabo, as the film deftly weaves together genres including the family epic, the romantic melodrama, landscape cinema, and comedy. The political economy of aid, development, and neocolonialism never overcomes the human story that Ouédraogo foregrounds: a tale of love, deception, jealousy, anger, grief, and new beginnings. “Militant cinema is fine, but cinema that shows Africa in another form is also militant because it permits Africa and others to see that there is laughing and crying here. Cinema is universal,” he stated in the same interview. Yam daabo exemplifies the filmmaker’s commitment to putting marginal figures at the center of his narratives, such as children, the elderly, drunks, adulterers, thieves, or migrants. We see Bintou and her friend, two adolescents, chatting, laughing, playing, and meeting lovers in the interstices of labor and familial obligations. Youthful love and friendship are treated as subjects worthy of emotional depth and weight on their own terms. There is a quest for a universality of feelings in Ouédraogo’s cinema that is anchored by his protagonists’ strong sense of individuality. The unforgettable ensemble of Yam daabo is made up of singular characters, not types.

Character-driven drama, however, is only one of the multiple modalities of the film. Ouédraogo revels in more realistic, documentary-based sequences centered on the daily rhythms of village life and labor, which he had previously explored in shorts such as The Bowls (1983) and Issa le tisserand (1985). At times, the film’s more experimental poetic sequences take precedence over narrative continuity. Ouédraogo’s concise shot language spares no cuts or ellipses. We know little, for instance, of the administrative or material difficulties the family might have encountered in settling in a new land. But the filmmaker offers, instead, moving long takes of the journey itself across sumptuous Sahelian landscapes. The poetic focus on agricultural labor, its rhythms, and its evocative sounds is reminiscent of the cinema of Senegalese filmmaker Safi Faye, who, in ways similar to Ouédraogo, also directed a resolutely tender, aesthetically sublime, and complex cinematic gaze on African peasantries who are too often depicted as unidimensional.

In spite of the singular choice indicated in the title of the film, Yam daabo is about myriad repeated decisions to insist on living and loving in the midst of scarcity or danger. “Let’s move!” and other variations on that tune become a familiar refrain throughout the film, an ethical imperative. Most memorably, it caps one of the film’s most traumatic sequences, during the family’s sojourn in the city. When the chorus of honking and harsh traffic sounds suddenly gives way to the sound of screeching tires followed by silence, life comes to a standstill. Passersby gaze in silence at the lifeless body of the little boy Ali, in compassionate spectatorship. Immediately after that, Ouédraogo, using a shot language full of deliberately abrupt slashes, cuts to a brief cemetery scene, before the family patriarch imperiously shouts, “Let’s go!” Except for the mother’s brief reluctance, no tears, no words are spared for the immense loss that has sliced through the fabric of the family. Life continues, the filmmaker tells us, in cut after cut, refusing to sugarcoat the abrasiveness of life with smooth transitions.

At the core of Ouédraogo’s cinema is a concern with ethics, individual dilemmas, and growth. He celebrates the collective ability to invent new possibilities and new beginnings without sacrificing the fierce individual personalities that form his cast of characters. Bintou, for instance, bravely asserts her love for Issa in defiance of her father, secure in the belief that time will mend the patriarch’s resistance to her choice of life partner. Tiga—Bintou’s stalker, who attempts to murder Issa, the man she loves—ends up banished from the community, exiled to the city. Ouédraogo’s humanistic narratives do not glide over the fierce disagreements and tensions that pull at the threads of the community. Rather than a fixed unit, the community emerges as a living, malleable assemblage; rather than a destiny, they face a constantly renegotiated choice to struggle together. Bintou’s baby, whose birth ultimately mends some of the dissensions between generations at the end, is named after the brother she lost at the beginning of the film: Ali. Life must go on.