Criterion Channel’s Thrillingly Evolving Roster

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Richard Brody
Staff writer

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The Criterion Channel, the foremost moveable source for art-house and repertory cinema, thrillingly expands its offerings each month, and has vigorously embraced a wide range of movies, spotlighting rare independent films and movies from around the world that have recently been restored and reissued. Some of this year’s prime theatrical rediscoveries have already turned up there, including David Schickele’s 1971 docufiction “Bushman,” in which Paul Eyam Nzie Okpokam, a Nigerian student in San Francisco, plays a version of himself (and augments the action with interviews), until his real life is seen to overtake the fiction; and the Mauritanian-born director Med Hondo’s 1979 political fantasy “West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty,” which features musical sequences—staged on a set that’s a replicated slave ship—about a popular uprising, in an unnamed Caribbean island nation, against French colonial overlords and corrupt local leaders.

Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young in “Man’s Castle.”

Photograph courtesy Criterion Collection

Earlier this year, a MOMA retrospective of the classic-Hollywood auteur Frank Borzage, who reworked Christian themes of redemption through all the genres he touched, presented a long-unseen cut of one of his greatest films, the Depression-centered romance “Man’s Castle,” from 1933. It stars Spencer Tracy and Loretta Young as two unhoused New Yorkers, scuffling to survive, who meet on a park bench and start living together—before marriage—in a shanty town. (Criterion streams the extended cut; the previously available version had been reëdited to comply with the moralistic Hays Code.) Another crucial restoration unveiled recently and on Criterion is “Not a Pretty Picture,” from 1976, one of the most significant of all American independent films, in which the director, Martha Coolidge, a survivor of rape, constructs a dramatization of the crime and the events leading up to it, while depicting herself working with the actors in an attempt to film the experience both truthfully and ethically.

The actress Pascale Ogier is one of the meteoric presences in modern cinema. She died in 1984, on the eve of her twenty-sixth birthday, and one of her most powerful performances is in Jacques Rivette’s “Le Pont du Nord,” from 1981, in which she acts alongside her mother, Bulle Ogier, in a comedic mystery involving corporate espionage and radical politics, government surveillance and the rugged charm of Paris’s decaying industrial zones. It now appears on Criterion, as does a newly programmed batch of Czech New Wave films, including “Case for a Rookie Hangman,” from 1970, Pavel Juráček’s delightfully strange and surrealistic updating of “Gulliver’s Travels,” in which antic absurdities and obscure threats reflect daily life under oppressive conditions.

About Town

Dance

Fifty years ago, Arlene Croce, then this magazine’s dance critic, heralded the advent of “the parody company we’ve been needing,” a troupe of men in pointe shoes called Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. The ensemble, Croce noted, was the creation of ballet fanatics, and its jokes were accurate, affectionate, and hilarious. In the decades since, the group has kept up the gags as its technical acumen has risen and risen. A three-week season at the Joyce, to celebrate the company’s golden anniversary, is heavy on old favorites, such as its classic sendups of “Giselle” and “Swan Lake,” but the first of two programs includes a première by the up-and-coming choreographer Durante Verzola.—Brian Seibert (Joyce Theatre; Dec. 17-Jan. 5.)

Ambient

The multi-instrumentalist Laraaji is among the most significant figures in all of electronic music. A New Age practitioner who found his way to the zither in the nineteen-seventies, Laraaji’s path forward was revealed through kismet: as he was busking in Washington Square Park in 1978, the ambient titan Brian Eno was drawn to his playing, leading Eno to produce Laraaji’s shimmering masterpiece “Ambient 3: Day of Radiance,” from 1980. In the decades since, Laraaji has released dozens of majestic albums, none more divine and blissful than “Vision Songs, Vol. 1.,” from 1984. To celebrate the album’s fortieth anniversary, he brings its restorative sounds to an ideal setting, a Brooklyn Heights church, with accompanying visuals that only amplify an ethereal experience.—Sheldon Pearce (First Unitarian Congregational Society; Dec. 20.)

Art

Cindy Sherman, Springs, East Hampton, New York, 2024.

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz / Courtesy the artist / Hauser & Wirth

After five decades as the busiest and most versatile of editorial photographers, Annie Leibovitz is still anxious to impress us with her skill and range. Her ambition is a given. “Stream of Consciousness,” a crowded, compressed retrospective of modestly scaled photographs from the past twenty years and a wall of small, push-pinned images, some of which date back much further, includes landscapes (Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” Edward Hopper’s childhood home), still-lifes (Lincoln’s top hat, Elvis’s bullet-shattered TV), and interiors (many of artists’ studios). But the majority of the images are engrossing, sensitive, and often startling portraits of famous people, including Joan Didion, Brice Marden, Kara Walker, Salman Rushdie, Billie Eilish, and Cindy Sherman. None of these pictures feel quickly or easily made; most are simply, and not so simply, beautiful.—Vince Aletti (Hauser & Wirth; through Jan. 11.)

Off Broadway

The title of Kallan Dana’s “Racecar Racecar Racecar” is a palindrome, as is almost everything about this sharp, swift, silly tragedy, directed by Sarah Blush with an eye for maximum discombobulation. A dad (Bruce McKenzie) and his grown daughter (Julia Greer) take a road trip across the U.S., playing word games; then they drive back, repeating their journey state by state, in reverse. All is not well, or even necessarily real: their speech garbles and slips; they pick up a hitchhiking pair (Ryan King and Camila Canó-Flaviá), who seem like their own, distorted, reflections. A more pedestrian symmetry emerges, too, when we see how alcohol affects them both. “The less I care, the better I am,” the daughter says brightly, and her father smiles in dreadful recognition.—Helen Shaw (A.R.T./New York; through Dec. 22.)

Cabaret

Bridget Everett and the Tender Moments.

Photograph by David Andrako

Grab your tinsel and gird your loins, people, louche-but-sweet holiday programming is coming to town! The Joe’s Pub lineup this year contains the traditional smorgasbord of beloved Pub habitués, many with recently gussied-up national profiles. The newly minted MacArthur “genius” grant diva Mx. Justin Vivian Bond offers “Flakes,” a snow-themed cabaret of naughtiness, Dec. 12-22. And two of the stars of the beautiful HBO comedy “Somebody Somewhere” glitter in their own variety shows: “Murray Hill: A Murray Little Christmas” spreads Hill’s waggish cheer around to a rotating group of guests, Dec. 12-20; and the outrageous vocal powerhouse Bridget Everett returns with her band, the Tender Moments, for another of her wine-soaked musical ragers, Dec. 17-21.—H.S.

Movies

Pedro Almodóvar’s melancholy new melodrama, “The Room Next Door,” about two New York-based writers, confronts ultimate matters with a conflicted blend of candor and evasion. Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a novelist, reconnects with a once-close friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), a war reporter, who has cancer. When Martha takes a turn for the worse, she asks Ingrid for help: Martha rents a lavish house upstate, where the two friends stay until Martha takes a pill that ends her life. Their emotionally fraught complicity, complicated by the involvement of Damian (John Turturro), a former lover of both women, is amplified by the grim and fascinating legal complications that result. As for death, Almodóvar renders it sanitized and decorative, embellished by luxury and taste—a worthy subject, if only had he explored it.—Richard Brody (In limited release.)

Pick Three

Sarah Larson on some of the best podcasts of 2024.

Illustration by Daniel Jurman

1. “The Belgrano Diary,” a London Review of Books series hosted by the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan, sustains an irresistible mood as it relays the horrific story of Britain’s 1982 sinking of the General Belgrano, the second-largest ship in Argentina’s Navy, during the Falklands War, and the political opportunism surrounding it. Amid O’Hagan’s thoughtful and intrepid interviews, stunning archival clips (“Rejoice!” Margaret Thatcher says), diary excerpts, and tasteful, evocative sound design, a masterly sequence of the attack embodies the series’ unforgettable blend of elegance and savagery.

2. In “Embedded: Supermajority,” the Nashville-based journalist Meribah Knight (“The Promise”) brings us inside the volatile Tennessee state house of 2023. Knight follows three Covenant Moms—conservative Christian mothers of students at the Covenant School, where a mass shooting had recently killed six people—as they attempt to influence their own party to pass gun-control measures and then experience one rude awakening after another. The sounds of everyone’s voices, constituents and politicians alike, convey as much as their words do, and the intimacy enhances the maddening implications.

3. The Economist’s “The Modi Raj” paints a vivid portrait of India’s strongman Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, tracing his rise to prominence. The savvy host, Avantika Chilkoti, talks to everyone from Modi’s tailor to a political consultant who recalls beaming Modi’s hologram to rural campaign rallies in 2014. (The hologram, he says, made Modi seem “omnipresent and capable of doing the unthinkable.”) The story’s details are edifyingly specific, its themes grimly universal.

P.S. Good stuff on the Internet: