The Best Gripping Movies to Watch on Criterionchannel

The Iranian director Jafar Panahi has faced constant persecution from his country’s government for over a decade, for his career of sharply political films speaking truth to power. In fact, No Bears—which was shot in secret, in defiance of the government banning him from filmmaking for 20 years—had its initial festival run in 2022 while […]

We all learned that it’s good to have a free press, but most of us rarely consider why it’s good, why we should fight for it, and how to do so, in the first place. Bad Press tackles one such fight, specifically the battle for free press in the Muscogee Nation, and while it only […]

There’s something rich at the heart of Afire that, whether intentionally or not, is kept at arm’s length from the viewer. Over the course of Leon’s (Thomas Schubert) quiet summer retreat to work on the manuscript for his second book, we come to understand his generally irritable nature as not just creative but existential. Through […]

Cure is about a mad society, where both cure and sickness might be one and the same. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa subverts the police procedural into an interrogation without definite answers, an abstract study on the evil that resides and is suppressed in every person’s heart. Unlike most horror films, Cure’s scares are left in plain […]

La Cérémonie is the kind of thriller you can watch repeatedly and glean new insight from each time. Right from its first scene, there’s something puzzling about the buttoned-up Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire) that narrows your focus and pulls you in. What’s remarkable is that, even after the secret Sophie’s keeping that seems to explain her […]

There are moments in our childhood that we deeply regret, even if we didn’t know better, even if innocence can excuse us, and even if we weren’t the ones primarily responsible for the mistake. The memory of it can be haunting, but none has been as devastating as the memory depicted in Louis Malle’s semi-autobiographical […]

Gosford Park inspired screenwriter Julian Fellowes to create Downton Abbey — but don’t let that association fool you, because this is no quaint, sentimental period drama but a scalding satire of 1930s England class relations (even though Maggie Smith does play a withering dowager countess here, too). Robert Altman, master orchestrator of ensembles, assembled a […]

Released in between Francis Ford Coppola’s famed Godfather trilogy, The Conversation is the director’s undersung gem of a film. It follows surveillance agent Harry (Hackman) as he obsesses over a conversation he’s asked to record. Hyperaware of how privacy is rendered useless by people like him, he starts to get overly suspicious about everything and […]

Before The Silence of the Lambs and Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal, there was Manhunter and Brian Cox’s deeply unnerving Dr. Lecktor. Michael Mann’s neon-lit serial-killer thriller follows Will Graham (William Petersen), a retired FBI agent lured back to work by a psychotic mass murderer whom no one at the Bureau can catch. But Will has something […]

Rosetta begins fiercely, with a shaky handheld camera chasing the eponymous teenager (Émilie Dequenne) as she storms across a factory floor and bursts into a room to confront the person she believes has just lost her her job. The film seldom relents from this tone of desperate fury, as we watch Rosetta — whose mother […]

It’s been decades since director John Cassavetes released this film about a dysfunctional marriage and family, yet it still feels fresh and subversive today. It follows a middle-aged woman named Mabel (Rowlands), who is deemed crazy by the people around her—she displays odd quirks and acts more like her kids than her peers—but Rowlands gives […]

In war, sometimes, what stands between life and death is convenient papers, passable acting, and a buttload of luck. That was true of real-life World War II survivor Solomon Perel, whose story is depicted in Europa Europa. Somewhat like a Jewish Forrest Gump, all Perel wants to do is survive, but through his pretenses, he […]

With a driver protagonist, trying to reintegrate with the rougher parts of his home city, forming a connection with a woman way out of his league, Soho-based Mona Lisa has spawned comparisons to the New York-classic Taxi Driver (1976), but this British neo-noir has a completely different tone and spirit, with a completely different conclusion. […]

See, usually, when American violence in media is critiqued, it’s usually through analytic studies or overly exaggerated lectures stirring moral panic. Instead of doing this, however, auteur Michael Haneke decided to surpass the crime genre, playing with the form and emotions in Funny Games. It’s terrifying, not because it immediately delves into the violence, but […]

Shattering the rules for how a biographical drama can look and be told, Paul Schrader’s Mishima rejects the usual character study template in favor of a much more abstract attempt to understand a person through their art. Told in fragments that flit between Mishima’s early life, dramatizations of his fiction novels, and the final day […]