No single home-video release this year, by any remotely comparable margin, generated greater waves than Criterion’s The Complete Kubrick—celebrations of a filmmaker, debates over pricing, and (for the sake of this joke pretend they’re spelled the same way) more drops of the word “canon” than a Civil War battlefield. All of this three months before it was released and anybody outside Criterion’s office saw one material shred of 30 4K and Blu-ray discs housed in ornate packaging.

The set is produced by Michael Chaiken, who’d already been ensconced in Kubrick’s world with last year’s Eyes Wide Shut 4K. Between this and archiving credits that read like a miniature history of post-war American art—Bob Dylan (which helped establish the Bob Dylan Center), Nicholas Ray, the Maysles and Safdie brothers, D.A. Pennebaker, Renata Adler, Harry Nilsson, and Norman Mailer, to say nothing of Ousmane Sembène or Isabella Rossellini—needless to say he boasts credentials worthy of assembling The Complete Kubrick. With it releasing today, Chaiken and I had a rather extended conversation on the many exhaustive steps that lead to this project of such distinction.

Michael Chaiken: Hi. It’s nice to see you and talk to you.

The Film Stage: It’s good to finally see you.

I loved—and we talked about this, I think over email—the Nigel Galt interview. I’m so happy that happened. I’m so glad that happened because he was so helpful in the course—not only Eyes Wide Shut, but the rest of the box set. And he’s never really spoken publicly before, out of respect for his relationship with Stanley. But I think enough time has passed, and I think that he realized that this Eyes Wide Shut thing is, you know, a serious project, and it was maybe time for him to speak up in terms of how important a role he had in the creation of that film and working with Stanley. And also just to put some of the sillier rumors to rest. [Laughs] Or tried to.

For sure. I appreciate you saying that because I’ve been able to talk to some people I really admire, and that was one of those cases where I was like, “I can just ask you… anything?” [Laughs]

I felt the exact same way! I was like: this guy was in a room for 15 months alone with Stanley Kubrick. He was the only person to see Eyes Wide Shut [at that time]. I mean, he told me that when Christiane [Kubrick], anybody came in the room, the monitor’s off. Nobody saw Eyes Wide Shut in Stanley’s immediate circle until after Stanley passed. Tom Cruise and Nicole saw it, and Terry Semel and Bob Daly and Warner Bros. But it was Nigel Galt who brought the film over to New York. Stanley put him on the Concorde to show it to Tom’s publicity person, and he was in the room with him. And I just said, “This is crazy.” [Laughs] All this talk around this film, like—this is the guy.

He was so generous, and he was so helpful. Because he worked with Stanley for a long time previous to Eyes Wide Shut, particularly on Full Metal Jacket, and he was able to give us some very helpful advice on the audio of Full Metal Jacket and the original mono track. So he was involved through that whole transition after Stanley passed. I mean, biographers have approached him, but he never wanted to go on record. So I loved your piece. I sent that to so many people. I sent it to the Kubrick estate and sent it to a lot of people interested in Eyes Wide Shut because I think it’s a very important contribution if you’re interested in the work of Stanley Kubrick and that film, particularly.

It was like talking to somebody who knew George Washington or something.

[Laughs] That’s a good way of putting it. Yeah, I agree.

Michael Chaiken

To gas you up a little bit, I feel like you’re assuming this mantle as well in the Kubrick history. Not that they’ve ever really been slacking on this sort of thing, but Criterion seems like they’re making more of a habit of the all-encompassing box set: you’ve had the Fellini, the Varda, the Pasolini, the Wes Anderson, Bergman. Kubrick is not at all a strange choice for this. But I’m curious when and how it was decided he’s going to be the next person?

Well, you know, my archive work is kind of my main profession, but I’ve been lucky that I’ve had this parallel career of sorts as an associate producer with Criterion, which goes back a long time, but it’s been about a decade or so that I’ve been helping them with certain discs. And so I got the call at the end of 2024. I was working on the archive of another Bronx-born director, Paul Morrissey, who worked with Andy Warhol, and Kim Hendrickson—who’s an old friend of mine and the executive producer at Criterion—she called me. We had just finished something—it might have been Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, because I helped them with that—but she said, “Look, we’re thinking.” It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that they were doing a complete Kubrick set. They were going to do something with Kubrick. “Would I be interested?” And it was, like, an immediate, absolute—it didn’t take any deliberation. [Laughs]

There are some people for whom Stanley Kubrick is like a secular religion, and I’m one of those people. So it was like: “I’m in. Tell me what you’re thinking.” And she said, “Well, we’ll get into the details, but we want to start with Eyes Wide Shut” because there wasn’t a 4K master of Eyes Wide Shut, and that would require a lot of work to get that done. So it started there, the end of 2024, and it was in the course of working on Eyes Wide Shut that we met as a group, all the departments met. It dawned on me that, wow, Criterion are in this incredible position because they’ve a history that goes back to the ’80s with Kubrick. They worked with him on his LaserDiscs: they did 2001 and The Killing and Dr. Strangelove, and they have a very good relationship with all the different studios—Sony, Universal, and obviously Warner Bros., who represent now the balance of Kubrick’s career. He signs that deal with Warner in the late ’60s, and I believe Warner Bros. acquired the MGM library from 1968 back, so that now also includes 2001.

So Criterion were like, “Hey, we could do a Kubrick set that includes all these other films.” And then the conversation was, I said, “Well, we’re so close to it being complete.” “Complete” being the independent films: Fear and Desire, his short films. “Would it be possible?” And at the end of the day, those were the trickiest because they were kind of the outliers—whereas, working with the studios, they already had, with the exception of Lolita and Eyes Wide Shut, 4K scans already existed. Criterion have a good working relationship with Universal, Sony, and Warner Bros. So it really was a question of, “Hey, can we do the short films? Can we include that?” And, you know, it took a while [Laughs] but it happened. It happened.

So the other titles, it wasn’t the same amount of lead-up, whereas Eyes Wide Shut required all this work because you’re really starting from zero and you’re building this thing, and working with Warner Bros. and the Kubrick estate. So it was somewhere in the middle of working on Eyes Wide Shut that they said, “Wow, okay, yeah. Let’s go for this. Let’s try to make this happen.” And it was the short films, actually, that were the trickiest. Particularly because Kubrick’s very first film, Day of the Fight, there’s actually two versions. And the version that circulates on 4K is not Stanley’s cut of the film. When he sold his cut of the film to RKO Studios, they re-edited the film—they added some footage, and they changed his narration and the score that he commissioned. So it was a real race at the end. It’s like: “Do we have the elements for his very first, like the original cut?” And it turns out Library of Congress were able to access—they did. And so we were able to make a new 4K scan, and it really reinforces the completeness.

I felt that having Stanley’s very first film effort was just essential; it was key. Even though it might be a small detail for some, if you’re more interested in the later features. Again: it was just researching this stuff and just finding out where this stuff resides. And Criterion being Criterion, they were able to work out the arrangement and the scanning of that. You couldn’t ask for a better partner on that front. So yeah: it was presented to me at the end of 2024, and then about halfway through Eyes Wide Shut it was like, “Okay, let’s see if we can make this complete.” And it took a while before I was like, “Yeah, we did it. [Laughs] We did it.” For a while it was almost, like, The Almost-Complete Kubrick because of the shorts.

I’m definitely the kind of freak who hears “complete” and goes, “You say complete, does that mean…” I do my CTRL+F search. It’s almost too embarrassing to admit. This is not a healthy way to live. You want to check, and there is that longer version of Day of the Fight, which I’m not sure I’d ever seen. And that’s kind of odd because it’s not all material that he shot, right? But it still feels like it’s good to have that there.

100%. Actually, weirdly, he completed Day of the Fight first. But apparently Flying Padre was the first Kubrick film to ever play in a theater, which he finished after Day of the Fight. But the RKO version of Day of the Fight played on the bottom of a double bill of My Forbidden Past. That was obviously the first Kubrick film that most people would have ever seen. So it was absolutely essential that it was on there. And it’s also out there in the world, so people know that as the version of Day of the Fight, so we wanted to be sure.

It’s also interesting to actually watch them back-to-back because they are different. It’s subtle, but they are different. Kubrick’s version ends in a much more existential way. Kubrick’s cut is much more Kubrick in the way that it ends. I mean, if you’re a real scholar, this is the kind of thing that you’d be interested in. But I—much like yourself—really got into the weeds of, “Well, what does this mean to be complete?” And we weren’t going to call it “The Definitive Kubrick” because, absent Stanley, what’s definitive?

A good mindset.

But there is a certain completeness in that these are all of his directorial efforts. And that can’t be argued. But, as you said, to do that meant both versions of Day of the Fight. Both versions of The Shining. The short version of The Shining, the international version of The Shining, is Stanley’s final cut of that film, and so for it not to be preserved… whether you love it or hate it or think “why would he do something like that,” it’s trickier for American audiences who kind of know the longer version. But that’s Stanley Kubrick’s final cut of The Shining, and for it just to be kind of lost would be a shame.

So I was very happy that Criterion were like, “Yeah, if we can do that, and if Warner Bros. agree and they want to work with us on that, we can make it happen.” And they did, and it was awesome. One of the reasons why I wanted Lee Unkrich to do the commentary on the international version was to make it more interesting, I think, for American audiences who might say, “Why would I want to watch a shorter version of The Shining?” [Laughs] But with Lee’s commentary on there, it’s a masterclass, and even if you’re like, “I love the American version. That’s the version I love and know,” having Lee kind of walk you through it and explain to you the changes that were made, on top of all the production history, I think makes it a really rewarding and interesting viewing experience.

The shorter version is different. It is different. The emphasis is slightly different. So it does change things. But like you said: getting into the weeds with this stuff was essential. I mean, most of the time I spent just researching the history of Stanley Kubrick on home video, which for a biographer who’s doing a serious bio on Kubrick—and there’s any number of good ones—that would be like a footnote. But it was a history that I had to delve into and understand, because Kubrick was very interested in how his films were being presented on home video and LaserDisc, and he died before the DVD revolution, and there was obviously no 4K or Blu-ray in 1999. We’re in a whole new realm now, absent Stanley.

It wouldn’t be a Criterion set without the emphasis on the physical product. I haven’t seen, admittedly, the final package, but I noticed that you have the slide-out paper sleeve element to the disc. And I know that can be a little controversial among fans, because there are worries about scratching and the preservation of the discs. From a purely physical standpoint, is there stress-testing that’s done on that sort of thing?

Yeah! I mean, I know that some collectors absolutely hate the sleeve discs, which I was unaware was such a controversy among physical-media collectors. But I trust Criterion because they’re the masters of these things, and apparently their other box sets have a similar design. I know these conversations were happening when I was working with the art department, and they did do some sort of test. There’s a plastic-lined pack to help with the disc going in and out, so it won’t be scraping against paper.

Got it.

[Laughs] But I did ask, “How serious is this?” They said, “We don’t get a lot of returns. If anything, we get a lot of returns from people who have broken the center of the jewel cases.”

Yes. Happens to me.

Those things break in shipping and the disc can fall and stuff like that. But they do—I mean, they definitely test this stuff out. They’re looking at samples that come in. They take all that stuff very seriously. And if it was a serious issue, I imagine it would have greatly affected some of their other box sets. But my role in that is: I’m interfacing with all the different departments to get them exactly what they need so they can do the work that they need to do.

The other thing, too, is: if people absolutely hate sleeves, I am working with Criterion to do standalone editions. So if you don’t want to buy the entire box or you’ve already bought these other excellent editions that have come out on 4K from Warner Bros. or Sony or whoever, there are going to be single editions starting, I think, next year. We’re still kind of working on that, what’s going to happen. So there will be standalone jewel-case editions.

Hopefully that’s not too annoying a question. It’s one of those things where I love getting into the weeds on this sort of decision-making.

Yeah, with the set, my role in all this is really almost like a quarterback. When they initially pitched the film to me, in my mind, I was thinking: you know those Library of America editions, those really beautiful kind of single editions? There was just a Jim Thompson one, and I love those. I have a number of them, and they’re these single compendiums of a particular author. Not only do they have the major works, but there’s also tangential material. It could be important correspondence, it could be archival material, it could be whatever to kind of give a fuller picture. And that was the first thing that came to mind for me in editing the Kubrick box. That was kind of the model: what would a Library of America Kubrick set look like?

There’s been all these great editions—there was a 50th-anniversary edition at Warner Bros. did of 2001 that was fantastic—but what could be additive to that? I mean, they’ve done all these great documentaries, a number of which have carried over. And so a lot of that is just researching what else is out there, what would be new? Kubrick’s fan base is so broad: there’s people who are chapter-and-verse in every scene, every shot, and then there’s people who might know a couple of the films, and then there’s a younger audience who might not know any of these films. And so we could put something together that’s going to grab that huge cross-section of people coming to see Stanley’s work.

So that’s kind of the start of things. And then I work with the individual departments and hear their ideas, their feedback—that goes for the art department, the tech people, the sound people. I might present some top notes. I thought the mono soundtracks were very important, that we could reinstate Stanley’s original mono mixes. But I’m not a tech person, so that would fall on Ryan Hullings, who’s the head of their sound department, and he’s the one that’s pulling things from the archives and he’s doing the sound mix and things like that. So I’m working broadly on what the architecture of the set is, but then I’m working individually with all these different people at Criterion. At the studios, too. It was a very collaborative effort.

Unlike my archiving gig, which is very solitary—just because I’ve worked for a while on the cataloging of things and this, that, and the other—the Criterion thing, I love it because it’s a team of people that I’m working with who have unbelievable ideas, and there’s so much back-and-forth and so much talk. [Laughs] I mean, I joke, but when things go through the editorial process at Criterion, it’s unbelievable. It’s unbelievable to me because I’m like: I thought I could write, but I’m getting an education reading all this editorial feedback. I love it. I mean, every comma, they’re so down the line with that, and that’s really exciting to me. I really like that part of the process when you’re really getting into the weeds like that, and it’s kind of at the end—now you’re kind of editing things and looking over things.

So, I mean, I think that relates to your question about the art, because I know they are getting samples and are looking at things. One of the things in the eleventh hour was: I had all these materials which I gave to them—like archival Kubrick materials—but there were certain things that were like, “This isn’t high-enough resolution.” And it’s like, “Fuck, okay. So can we go back to the archive? Let me see if I can rescan this. Let me see if I can borrow this.” There’s a lot of that: just trying to get people the materials they need to do the best job they can do.

I’ve done a lot of work producing discs myself, and one of the things that always would drive me mad was, with a Blu-ray, the motion menu. What the hell do you make for the motion menu? So the first thing I did was pop in the discs just to see what you guys chose. A Clockwork Orange has quite the start—the trailer for the film, I think.

Sort of. It’s kind of a variation of that unbelievable trailer.

Okay.

And so it’s a little bit longer, but it—it definitely apes the language and style of that original trailer.

Spartacus is a movie that I’ve only ever seen on DVD, and I think part of why I’ve never really liked it that much is because I’ve seen it in not-ideal condition. And I popped in the 4K, and the first second I just went, “Oh, fuck.” Because you see the transfer, you see the red capes and the tans in the desert. Or the start of the 2001 menu I found interesting because it seems like it’s stressing the transfer and the resolution with the presence of the small human figures against the vast spaceship. My own impressions, but I’d love to hear your perspective.

That’s really cool. I appreciate the fact that you dig the menus, because they’re a lot of fun to do. I do them with a photographer and editor friend of mine. His name is Jarred Alterman. He’s done some amazing work, and he’s great with that kind of stuff. The thought with the menu loops is: we have to give people the feeling of the film, but we can’t give anything away. You have to be evocative of a certain mood or a certain tension, but at the same time, we don’t want to give away the key shots. We don’t want to give away plot elements. It’s like an evocation of the movie. And if you have the choice, you could do just static menus—you could do just a still—but I really like the dynamic, the menu loops.

They’re a lot of fun to do. And tricky, tricky. I mean, Stanley gives you any number of unbelievable shots, but when I think of those things, I think: somebody puts in the disc, and then they have to leave the room or something, and they have to go get a drink, and they have to do this before they actually start the movie. So it’s this thing that’s probably playing for more than the minute that you’re allotted to make those loops. They’re just thought of as these little evocations of the movie without giving too much away.

Just to circle back: you guys took the Clockwork Orange preview and then did a reconstruction of it? Did you add stuff to what existed? Did you take stuff away?

Oh, yeah, we added stuff. There’s a Spanish filmmaker [Pablo Ferro] who did the original trailer, which is on there. In the trailer section, there is an HD version of the original Clockwork Orange trailer. But that’s one of my favorite trailers. I mean, it’s really a mindblowing trailer. And I said, “Jarred, let’s elongate this.” If you’ve never seen Clockwork Orange before and you pop that disc in, that is just going to be a total assault in the style of the original trailer. So it’s a little bit longer—there are obviously shots that aren’t in the original trailer—and it was fun editing that. I mean, there must be hundreds of cuts in that menu. But it works. The thing about the Clockwork Orange original trailer is: it’s just perfect. And it is so evocative of the insanity of that movie. So the menu, it’s hard to beat that one. It’s hard to beat that trailer. Also, it’s so much crazier than all the other menus, which don’t have that kind of style of rapid montage.

Eyes Wide Shut

One of my favorite things in the Eyes Wide Shut interview that we did was the compare-and-contrast slides of the 2007 Blu-ray with the 2025 4K. When the first stills came out, suddenly everybody’s an expert on what the movie is supposed to look like.

[Laughs]

And it’s fine. People have to talk about something. But I remember popping in that disc, which I got a couple of weeks early and just had to check it out, and again it was that, “Oh, fuck, I have to watch this right now” moment. So you guys are never not subject to that sort of conversation.

Sure.

But when do you guys know that you’re done? I have a beautiful TV, but I drove myself insane calibrating it when I first got it—gamma levels and all that. So for you, what is the point where you say, “Okay, pencils down.”

Well, with Eyes Wide Shut, it was when Warner Bros. and Stanley Kubrick estate gave us the thumbs up [Laughs] and said, “We’re happy with this.” The thing that I found so baffling is that certain factions of the Kubrick audience seem to think that Criterion can just take these films and just do whatever they please to them. And that is absolutely not the case. These are 100% collaborations with the studio—in the case of Eyes Wide Shut, Warner Bros. and the Stanley Kubrick estate. They own the rights to these films. Criterion are sublicensing it. Warner Bros. are saying, “Go ahead, make a 4K master.” But they did the transfer. Before we even got to the color-correct in London, it was already color-matched to an archived 35mm print. So by the time we sat down with Larry Smith, there had already been a color grade to match the original theatrical color grade, which—as we know—is different for whatever reasons.

The video masters that came out in the early 2000s and the Blu-ray—maybe because of the limitations of technology, maybe just because it was too grainy and it would look like mush—is just not exactly how the film looked when it was presented theatrically. Eyes Wide Shut is a heavily grainy film; he force-developed the entire movie. And Nigel Galt, I don’t know if he told you, there was a temporary color correct that he did for Stanley, because he took that work print and he was the one that brought it—Stanley put him on the Concord—to Tom, Nicole, Bob Daly, Terry Semel of Warner Bros. So Nigel handled that. I asked him, ” I know there wasn’t final color because Stanley passed and he didn’t work on it, but was there any kind of temporary?” Nigel said, “Yes.” And they had Larry on the phone constantly. “What did we shoot that at? Where are the time formats?” He told me that Stanley had him reprint a couple of scenes before they showed it to Tom and Nicole.

Unfortunately, and I looked, it appears that that workprint is gone. It just doesn’t exist. Stanley had Leon Vitali destroy his outtakes and workprints and things like that. But we do have the finished print, and I talked to Larry Smith and Nigel Galt separately to get their feelings on Eyes Wide Shut, the old masters, and how it looked theatrically. And they both came back with the same thing: they said it was broadly correct, but parts of it were just way too bright, because there was no need to force-develop the daylight scenes. It was the daylight scenes that they had more of an issue with than the nighttime scenes. Because when there was that much light, why would you need to force-develop the daylight scenes? So they just thought it was a little bit uneven.

So by the time we took it to London and I sat with Larry, Larry’s role was to help kind of find the balance, make sure it wasn’t too grainy, but grainy enough, and also to just kind of watch with the HDR, because with HDR you can make these films look like cartoons if you go way too heavy. And we’re in the realm of digital cinema; we’re in a realm that Kubrick would never have imagined. Even though he worked with Criterion on the LaserDiscs—and I talked to the people who produced the LaserDiscs while I was researching the box set—they are still an analog media. It’s not a digital media. The audio is digital, but the picture is not. So digital cinema is like a completely… Stanley didn’t live, unfortunately, long enough to see the dawning of all this stuff. So what I was told by the people who worked with Stanley on his LaserDiscs: he wanted to keep it as filmic as possible, but understood it’s a completely different medium with its limitations.

So when we took Eyes Wide Shut to London and we were working with Larry, it was really just to make sure that we don’t go over-the-top with the HDR, that it has an evenness to it, and that the grain is there and is prominent, but it isn’t mushy, and is it too distracting? And then we take that master and we show it to Warner Bros. and the Kubrick estate, and they have notes. “We’ve gone back and we’ve looked at that scene; we think that should be a little brighter, we think that should be a little warmer.” “Okay, absolutely.” We show Larry. Larry said, “Yeah, that’s good, that’s good.” So it’s much more of a conversation. It isn’t like we make a transfer and Larry Smith and Criterion come in, turn some knobs and say, “Print.” [Laughs] It doesn’t work that way! Because these films are owned by Warner Bros., they’re owned by the studios. You don’t have carte blanche.

It’s done when everybody is in agreement. “This looks, this is good, and this feels as close to…” I mean, Eyes Wide Shut, it’s a big question mark because Stanley died. So there is no final, final color correct. So it’s tricky. But we know how Leon Vitali worked on the film and helped with the color-timing, and it came out theatrically, and so we match it to that. I think—at the end of the day, after all the debates—people have come around to the fact that the 4K master looks a lot like how the film looks when I saw it in the movie theater over Christmas.

It’s also a big difference when you actually see it in motion and the colors are, operatively speaking, moving around the screen.

100%. 100%. 100%. Because when you pull these things on the Internet, you’re tone-mapping it so you’re not doing any version any justice. You’re not doing the old Blu-ray any justice. One of the things that immediately, when I was working on it, there was a fan scan—somebody scanned a 35mm print of Eyes Wide Shut and it circulates among collectors, torrent people, whatever. So I had that. Well, clearly this looks different than what has come out on video. So that was a touchstone, too. But then when you’re scanning from the original camera negative, it’s a whole other ball game.

I mean, the other thing, too, is—everybody knows this—Stanley was an absolute perfectionist. He wasn’t shitty. So much of the look of the film is baked into the negative itself, and so it isn’t like you could go too far this way or too far that way. I mean, you can royally screw it up by going just too heavy with the HDR or making the colors so garish. But I just matched it to how it looked theatrically, and I think, at the end of the day, people have got to come around. Because it came out in November of last year and Eyes Wide Shut has, weirdly, become a Christmas movie, and people were like, “Oh, I saw it at the cinematheque—it looked like the Criterion master. Yeah, it had all this grain.” But if you’ve only seen the video, if you’ve only seen the Blu-ray, you’re probably thinking, “What the fuck? This isn’t how I remember it.” Which is cool. I mean, I like the Blu-ray; it has its own quality to it.

It’s like, with these new editions, when a new edition of a book comes out. It’s not like you throw away the first printing. You know, you savor it. You say, “Oh, okay, that was…” And that’s kind of how I feel. I mean, for me, I absolutely adore and love that first Stanley Kubrick DVD box set that Warner Bros put out in July of ’99. It was right when Eyes Wide Shut came out. It was the first collection of Stanley’s films on DVD, and they were full-frame, they were 1.33, they had the mono soundtracks on. But people were pissed because they weren’t restored, and so it got pulled pretty quickly. But I coveted that thing when it came out. And so the new set, in some ways, is kind of honoring all these other editions that have come out.

That’s one of the things I’m proudest of: is to look at that credit sheet at the back of the book, and to see Leon Vitali named, to see Janet Wilson, who’s the colorist at Warner Bros., named. To see all these people. To see Martin Hunter, who edited Full Metal Jacket; he was the first person to do a telecine in 1981 or ‘82 for Stanley, and it was The Shining. He worked with Stanley on almost all his telecines in the ’80s; he worked with Warner on the LaserDiscs. It’s just great to see all these names in the credits, because I feel like the Kubrick set is, in a lot of ways, kind of honoring all this work that came before. So it was important for me that all those people were recognized, which is why all the credits: so people can understand who did the color work, who did the transfer work.

A Clockwork Orange

A film like 2001 or A Clockwork Orange, those have 4K studio releases. I assume that those are instrumental in figuring out how you’re going to master it for Criterion.

100%. We couldn’t go from ground zero. It wasn’t like Criterion can just sit there and say, “Okay, we’re going to recolor-correct 2001 based on a print that we’ve…” It’s just like: no. [Laughs] Warner Bros. was saying, “We did this. We have the answer print.” They have materials that you wouldn’t normally be able to access, and they’ve been so generous with all that stuff. But they were totally open to notes. And so there are some subtle changes—especially in The Shining and Full Metal Jacket—just, you know, certain tweaks to put it a little bit more in line, or to put it in line with how the film is presented theatrically. And that goes from metatextual things, like the Saul Bass Warner Bros. logo that’s at the head of The Shining.

Oh, yes.

The previous edition was the newer one. So we said, “Can we put that on? Can we?” “Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great idea. Let’s do that.” You know? It’s like: the end titles of The Shining, for whatever reason—this happened in Stanley’s lifetime—changed color. If you look at the DVD and some of the later video editions, the end titles became white. I’m assuming they did that for legibility’s sake—that the blue would have bled too much—but we said, “Hey, could we change that back to the original theatrical blue?” And Warner Bros. said “sure.” They had looked at the answer print. They said, “You know what, you’re right. They were originally blue, so yeah—let’s do that.”

This all goes back to your original question: when are they done? They’re done when all of the partners are saying, “We’re happy with this.” And that’s the Kubrick estate as well. That’s when it’s done: when everybody kind of signs off. So it isn’t like Criterion can just go and wreck [Laughs] this stuff. The studios have done excellent editions, so that was the challenge: how do we be additive to these editions, and are there any subtle things we can tweak to kind of put them more in line with the way they look theatrically? Which is the 1.85 aspect ratios, the Saul Bass logo at the head of The Shining, and to just not go over-the-top with the HDR so it retains a filmic, warm look. I felt the same way looking at Spartacus, because when I was reviewing all the discs, I was looking at them on a couple of different monitors, and one of the monitors was a perfectly aligned setup and it was like, “Okay, this is really, really nice. Really nice.” And that’s one of the films that, for me, got elevated just personally as I was working on this set. This is an incredibly beautifully photographed film. I’ve never gotten that before.

The last real question I have then is—and sorry if this keeps circling back to online discourse and making it seem like you have to defend yourself, because I don’t think you do—but—

Well, I like the online discourse. I follow all of it. I love the Blu-ray forums; I love the Reddit. I find that stuff really helpful, actually. I mean, the cranky stuff, who cares? Everybody’s entitled to their opinion. But there are a lot of very informed people on these things, and some of them are very funny, so I enjoy that. But in putting this set together, I went and talked to fans—like, people on Facebook. One of the main consultants for me was this guy, Stephen Rigg, who runs the Stanley Kubrick Appreciation Society on Facebook. These are people that have spent their entire lives thinking about and collecting Stanley Kubrick, and they know every iteration of every edition, and so picking their brains and saying, “Look, I’m thinking about doing this. I want to go after this. Has this ever been seen before?” They know.

And there are certain elements on that box set that some of the fans were responsible for—just finding certain things and certain elements. The only time I can’t stand the online discourse is when it attacks people like Larry Smith. It’s like, “Oh, he desecrated Eyes Wide Shut.” It’s such nonsense. You know, I’d rather they say “the producer of this set is a moron” than attack these people who I’m watching work their asses off for nothing. You know? To just put these things out and make them as good as we possibly can.

I got some comments about how Nigel Galt is actually part of the Illuminati because he said that Eyes Wide Shut doesn’t expose the Illuminati.

Right. That’s good: it keeps people talking about the film. So it’s… fine.

And it’s exciting for me because that means I talked to a member of the Illuminati. Imagine how I feel.

[Laughs] I mean, the thing with Eyes Wide Shut I find so baffling is, like: do people realize it is based on a book?

That would require they read a book.

And there’s any number of books written about the various hellfire clubs of the 18th century. It isn’t like rich decadence is some foreign, alien concept. A lot of this stuff is just in the ether as urban legend, or is just totally exaggerated rumor about the rich. Yeah, clearly Stanley knew about all this stuff and was probably as interested as anybody else. But all this stuff is in the Schnitzler book, so… [Laughs] It just so happens that Stanley is prescient, but he’s always been. I mean, 2001 is as relevant today as it was in 1968.

Yeah. I also think understanding Eyes Wide Shut requires having been in a real relationship and having sex, which is a problem for a lot of these people.

[Laughs] Yeah.

The Shining

From my own experience, I know how much work goes into just a barebones disc. Which brings me to this discussion of the price point of the box set. People never say, “Oh, the problem is that it’s too cheap,” right? I have my own experience, I have my own feelings about it, I think you know which way I lean. But I’d like to hear straight from the horse’s mouth about how the pricing of these things is decided. What the thinking is behind some of that? It’s also being released right before the Barnes & Noble sale, which doesn’t seem like a coincidence.

Honestly, I have no part in the pricing discussion. It’s not my domain. What I would say: I have to assume if you’re paying full price, you want it day one. Great! But as you said: there’s the Barnes & Noble sale. And if you don’t want to buy the entire set… first of all, I can tell you: this was an expensive set to produce. Without a doubt. The licensing was really complicated, and not necessarily for the studio films, but all the extra stuff is very complicated, expensive. And as you know, having produced these things, they’re like jigsaw puzzles. It seems like an absurd thing to be complaining about, how challenging it is to put together a DVD, but they are challenging because they do require a lot of diplomacy, a lot of research, and a lot of just exorbitant licensing fees.

There were a couple of things that I would have loved to have included on the set, but it just would have made other things impossible because it’s just too much money. And it’s like: well, the dollars are better spent over here. In terms of pricing: I don’t know because I really don’t know what the manufacturing costs are. That’s a Criterion question.

Got it.

But I can tell you, just from what I’ve seen, some of it is the manufacturing, but a lot of it is the licensing. And none of this stuff is getting any cheaper. But I would say, yeah: wait for the sale. [Laughs] Also, if you’re like, “I’ve bought these. I have, like, half of this set. I bought the 50th anniversary 2001,” I’m working with Criterion now on standalone editions. Because the hope is to get this stuff in the hands of people—particularly younger people who might not have seen these films. That was a big thing for me. We were talking about the box set that came out in 1999; that was a huge thing for me. I was too young to see a lot of these films’ first run. I was born the year Barry Lyndon came out, so video, for me, was my gateway into Kubrick. So we want this stuff to get into the hands of younger people. You want these films to survive. You know, Kubrick’s fan base is so broad. There’s the people who are chapter-and-verse in every scene, and then there’s people who might have only seen one or two, or none at all.

Stanley was, from what I understand—from talking to Martin Hunter, who worked with him on LaserDisc—less perfectionist as people seem to believe. He understood that there were certain limitations. You always try, but if you can’t get it perfect, it’s fine. He was much more interested in people seeing these films, people being engaged in the story. If you’re looking at the number of pixels, you’re not watching the movie—you’re watching your equipment, you know? And I think that he, more than anything else, wanted these films to survive. He wanted to be remembered for his work. For me, that’s the essential thing. How do we push these films forward? I think this set helps us to do that.

I agree.

And hopefully to get it into as many hands as possible. So there will be future Criterion editions—there will be single editions—and I’ve been talking to them about that. That rollout will happen over the next couple of years. The box set is a beautiful thing. It’s a bespoke thing that is kind of the first move in what I think, and what I hope, will be a longer process. Also, doing the set, I have to say, a lot of people haven’t talked in decades—people who are responsible for making these films. Nigel Galt and Larry Smith hadn’t talked in decades. Also, you know, Leon Vitali is no longer here, and other people at the studios have moved on. So this was like a really good opportunity to connect people again, to get people talking, and what I hope is going to make future things possible.

So yeah, again: it just comes back to keeping these films out there, keeping them in the conversation, because I think that, for Stanley, that was really the key. He wanted his films to be remembered. He didn’t want to be thought of as a genius. He didn’t care about that shit. He wanted his films to survive. And I think that this is a good push in that direction.

I mean, I only have the utilitarian label-free discs right now, and I feel that looking at them. So: tip of the cap, job well done. The very, very last thing—and this is kind of a quick, feel-free-to-confirm-or-deny question—but Jennifer Lynch, David Lynch’s daughter, has talked about future Criterion plans for a big Lynch set. I don’t know if you can say anything about that or even know anything about that, but selfishly, I have to ask.

Honestly, I don’t.

Okay.

Because there’s another producer, Susan [Arosteguy], who has worked with David on all the Criterion pieces. I mean, I hope it happens. The Criterion Lynch discs are so amazing, but I don’t have anything to do with that stuff. I’m kind of in and out of Criterion. So I was as surprised as anyone that they were doing a Kubrick set. But I don’t know about the Lynch set. I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened. I hope it happens, but I don’t know. They’re doing Wild at Heart, right? Future plans, I don’t know.

Well, I appreciate you entertaining the invasive question.

[Laughs]

You’re very, very generous with your time. It really is great to hear straight from the horse’s mouth on this, because it feels like this totemic, from-this-point-forward kind of thing you guys have done.

Good, I’m glad. It was challenging, but it was a lot of fun. To just be part of that conversation and to help, just to be talking to you about Stanley Kubrick, and to be part of any serious conversation about Stanley Kubrick is mind-blowing to me. [Laughs] I’m speaking as a fan, and I feel like the impetus behind this was to bring on new people to show them this work and get them excited about this work. But also, as a fan, to do something that would be an event in the Stanley Kubrick universe.

The Complete Kubrick is now available through the Criterion Collection.

As You Can See Everything proves to be their Halloween-timed hit, A24 has set Jeremy Saulnier’s Halloween-themed mystery-thriller Slayground (formerly titled October) for January, but we are at least getting the first substantial look at the film this month.

With a cast including Cory Michael Smith, Chase Sui Wonders, Sophie Wilde, James Badge Dale, Stanley Simons, Stephen Root, Chris Sullivan, Young Mazino, Imogen Poots, Matty Matheson, and Macon Blair, the first official trailer has now arrived ahead of a January 29 release.

Here’s the synopsis: “Scare-actor “Metal Mike” Graves wakes up in a haunted attraction surrounded by the dead bodies of his co-workers with no memory of how they got there. As a state-wide manhunt closes in, he races to uncover the truth – even if the trail leads straight back to him.”

See the trailer below for the film, which features a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

In 1972, legendary director William Greaves set out to record history. With the help of Jean Hutson and Regina Andrews, two librarians at the Schomburg Center of Research in Black Culture, he threw a cocktail party in Duke Ellington’s apartment, convening a joyful group of surviving Harlem Renaissance artists, writers, and musicians. That day, Greaves and four camera operators (including his son, David) filmed the conversations, recitations, and deliberations of Richard Bruce Nugent, Aaron Douglas, Eubie Banks, James Van Der Zee, and other luminaries in colorful 16mm film, capturing a once-in-a-lifetime moment that resembled life 50 years earlier. 

As Greaves began piecing the documentary together with David, he realized the still period photography he’d collected and the film they’d just shot didn’t match aesthetically. Greaves eventually incorporated the stills into a 30-minute 1974 documentary From These Roots, but the live-action footage sat unused for decades. At least until 2022—eight years after Greaves died—when his widow, Louise Archambault Greaves, obtained a grant from the Ford Foundation to digitize and assemble the unfinished archive. Before Louise died a year later, she handed the project’s keys to David and his daughter, Liani Greaves, to complete the film with editor and producer Anne de Mare. 

The result is Once Upon a Time In Harlem, a minor miracle—or, as New Yorker film critic Richard Brody wrote last year, “one of the greatest cinematic works of creative nonfiction” that he’s “ever seen.” Leaning into his father’s experimental style and double-screen formats (a nod to his masterwork Symbiopsychotaxiplasm), David captures the bustling spirit of the apartment’s lively, candid figures, intermixing occasional talking heads and history with the handheld immediacy of their cross-room talk. Like his father intended, David pulls you into snippets of intimate discussion, then pivots as real-time interruptions funnel into larger group recollections. It feels like one living, breathing document, layering a 1920s community onto a 1970s landscape seen through today’s lens. 

As Once Upon a Time in Harlem begins its theatrical run, I caught up with David Greaves inside NEON’s Manhattan office. In a thoughtful, at-times-emotional interview, he reflected on his memories working with his father, piecing together the archive, and learning more about that foundational era of Black life. 

The Film Stage: When your dad started this documentary in 1972, you were a 26-year-old camera operator. You’re watching all these luminaries walk into Duke Ellington’s home. What do you remember about preparing for that day?

David Greaves: Well, that’s so funny. You’re the first person to ask me about preparing for that day, because that’s the part I remember. I don’t remember the day itself because I was working. When I saw myself and others in the rough cut, the outtakes, and in the mirrors, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. That was me.” I remember my father telling me that I was going to be one of the camera people. And I knew this was a big deal. In preparation for that, I usually read a book called Family of Man. It was a family of images. And so I always go through that for framing and that kind of stuff. But the actual shoot itself: I cannot give you a moment.

How familiar were you with all of these people in the room? Did you know everyone by name and their backgrounds?

No, I only met two people. One was Richard B. Moore. He was a mentor to my father. I met him at his bookstore one time. And then, of course, Eubie Blake, because we did From These Roots, and Eubie did the music for it. It was incredible. What had happened was that I picked him up and brought him to the studio. And there was a heavy rock band there, heavy metal. So finally they finished and then we went in. And then Eubie walked over to the piano. And he’s 89 years old. And the little guys were like, “OK, watch this old guy.” And then Eubie sat down.

I’m sorry—I will tear up if I tell this. He sat down to play, and [my dad] said, “Eubie, the men are coming back from the war. Play it.” Eubie hit it. “Eubie, the people are migrating from the South.” Eubie hit it. “People are enjoying…” Eubie hit it. Those guys were like, “What the hell?” I mean, the whole atmosphere in the control room changed.

He knew every cue for what you wanted.

Dad just told him what to do, and he’d hit it. It was unbelievable! You had to be there to see that. 

David and Liani Greaves at the 64th New York Film Festival. Photo by Sean DiSerio.

As you were filming Once Upon a Time, what was your relationship like with your dad and his filmmaking? Did you understand what he was trying to achieve with a lot of his films, or were you just kind of along for the ride? 

I didn’t meet my father until I was 12. I first worked with him one Christmas break. I was finishing up The First World Festival of Negro Arts and I rolled up the outtakes of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. He was telling me about the things he was doing. “Gee, that sounds more fun than spending another couple of years in the library.” So I said, “Yeah, let me go to Columbia instead of California for graduate school.” So I went to Columbia. I worked with him for, like, 15 years or so. They say in the film, “It is the now when you’re there.”

When we did Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, it got all these awards, and I just thought that if you do a film, you get awards. I just thought that was the way things worked, because Voice of La Raza, we got awards. The hallway was lined with awards. And so my father obviously was very good at it, and I was sitting next to him all the time, taking my notes and stuff. I guess he’s in my brain because, when I started to go back over this footage I said, “Oh, I want to go back and see something.” And my hand shot out to where the control panel would be on the editing machine some 50 years later. I realized that’s the same thing that was going on in my head in terms of being back in the editing room.

You mentioned the idea of not knowing when you’re “in an era” when you’re in the middle of it. Was that also the case for you as you filmed the cocktail party? Did you realize how special this would be at that moment? 

Well, when I was preparing for it, I knew it was going to be special. I knew it was going to be a special time. But I did not know what it would be now. It was a film that we were doing…

You were expecting this to come out the following year.

Yeah, exactly. You’re working on the film now, and you don’t know what it’s gonna be 50 years later when people look at it. “Oh, Jesus, I had no idea that was happening.” I compare it to a story I was reading—they have a new telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which is more powerful than the Webb. It can see as close to the Big Bang as you can get—but it can’t see it itself. This film is like that. It brings you as close to the Harlem Renaissance as you can get. You can’t see it, but it’s as close as you can get. In the film, Richard B. Moore says, “Everything converged, and there was this little glow of light and learning.” And that’s what we’re looking at: the glow.

Your dad really struggled for decades with how to structure and format this footage into the movie he wanted. Why do you think he struggled with this so much? 

He and my stepmother, Louise Archambault Greaves, wanted to show the effect of the Renaissance throughout the decades, because they were filming up to the early 2000s, shooting digitally at that point. So I think that’s what that was. But he never returned to say, “Let’s just do this.” He did an original rough cut, but he didn’t go beyond that. And I don’t know; I can’t give you a thinking of why he chose not to just complete it with the footage we had. But his treatments involved some contemporary talking heads—Sidney Poitier, Brock Peters doing narrations and stuff. So we decided to just stay with that time. And that worked out.

This entire restoration started with Louise receiving a Ford Foundation grant in 2022. How did you become involved with completing it after that?

After she got the grant, the film and the footage were restored. And then she passed. The footage was completed and the restoration was completed. The first meeting, I remember, we had at Bill Bland’s office, who did the restoration, and I said, “I’m not just gonna turn it over to an editor.” But it was when we were up at Firelight Studio with Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith when Marcia said, “OK, so who’s gonna direct this?” I said, “I will.” I couldn’t imagine turning it over to anybody else.

It felt personal to you.

Sure. I couldn’t see anybody else doing this. And Louise and I had spoken about it. She would say, “We’re gonna get you a director. What about so-and-so?” Well, he didn’t know Bill. “What about so-and-so?” I was quiet during all her discussions. I just kept my mouth shut. She couldn’t make that final decision. And she gave a note to me. She said, “At the end, y’all will do it.” So, in the end, that’s how it came. 

At the start of this project, how did you start thinking about what to highlight in 60,000 feet of film? Did you start with scenes you loved and then go from there?

Yeah, I went through it chronologically, and I was looking at my early notes. And a lot of the things I saw in the early notes are in the film. You’re cutting it down, cutting it down. And a funny thing is that my father, when he was teaching me and helping me with my algebra, said, “Start at the introduction, start at the first page, and just go from there.” So I’m looking at my early notes of “How to Make a Documentary.” That was in my mindset. You don’t know everything. Let me just start at the introduction. And there was even a time when we had no money, and I said to Anne de Marre, “I’ll edit it.” She said, “David, an editor will make it sing.” And she did. She’s a super editor—brilliant—and she’s the one that makes it seamless throughout.

Behind the scenes of Once Upon a Time in Harlem

I love the double box, like you use in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.

Oh, yeah. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm gave us the license to do whatever we wanted. You wanna have slates in the frame? That’s fine. You wanna have the director giving direction? That’s fine. We had multiple cameras. Why don’t we use it and put them both up there? So the split screens grew out of the license that Symbiopsychotaxiplasm gave us. And then, of course, we had the archival footage, some of which is new, but a lot of this stuff that I had originally shot.

It really captures the overlapping conversations that would have happened in that salon.

Yes, yes, yes.

I thought it was a really interesting way to capture the feeling of it, as opposed to just one frame.

Well, you know, you can see the reactions. It’s theatrical, if you will. [My dad] said that at the end of it, “The film has to be theatrical and move at a snappy pace.” Which is what we did. He had four cameras. He had gotten this group of incredible people together. He got all this creative energy into one spot, and knew that something would happen. Like with Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, you bring all these creative people together, something’s gonna happen. It just grew out of that energy. And they look beautiful on screen. 

And the interviews give context to what they’re talking about.

You see the importance of the librarians. Regina Andrews at the library. These guys would come in and she’s fascinated by them. So you have a beautiful young lady fascinated by you and your work, wanting to say, “Hey, do you want to come up to the place? We’re gonna have some people here.” 

They were almost the facilitators.

Oh, absolutely. They were like the nucleus that these folks began to circle around and collaborate. And she says, “You see Langston writing prose, Arna Bontemps doing sketches…” That group contained Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen. So they were critical.

I think about celebrities who are so used to phones and being recorded all the time. Our understanding of how to present ourselves has changed so much with this new reality. When you look back, it does feel like nobody really noticed the cameras. Was that refreshing to watch back? 

There were only a couple of instances when the cameras were mentioned. I think when we even put one of them in the film. Ida Mae Cullen said, “Thank you, Bill.” And then one other time when Bruce Newton just said, “Oh… [Gesturing to the camera].” But that was it. It wasn’t like people were like, “The camera’s on now…” They were just interacting and we were just capturing it.

Yeah. It felt almost like a high school reunion.

Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. And the camera people were all experienced with cinema verite. Dad had worked with them for years. I worked with them on camera for years, too, so at that point it’s a matter of having people who are experienced. My father always said, “You can tell a lot about a cameraman if he’s afraid to go in close. That’s where all the action is. You’re all right in there.” And in his interviews on Regina, or on Richard B. Moore, when we recite “If We Must Die” at the end of that—he zoomed in close to catch that, you know?

Yeah.

So the camera people knew what to do. The sound people knew. These are guys we traveled around with all the time. So it’s experienced people with an incredible cast of characters and you bring all that energy together.

Was there a specific moment or interaction that has still stuck with you since you’ve wrapped this project?

My daughter will tell you, and Anne will tell you that. If I had my druthers, Dad would always leave things in the cut long after I knew they had to come out. I’d say to myself, “Why is he leaving it in there?” And the same thing with Richard B. Moore and me. This guy is incredible. You can hear Dad off-camera say, “Give me another magazine. You’re costing me a lot of money, Mr. Moore.” [Laughs] Because it costs money to just put in another 10-minute mag. But Richard Moore is incredible with the history that he knew. And then, of course, there’s Leigh Whipper. There’s another one with his Haile Selassie speech. I love that speech. And he recited it straight through.

At 96.

Yes, 96 years old. He said, “You want to hear it?” And he began. He just bangs it right out. I said that you can’t have the whole thing in, so I cut it down and I said, “What points would Vladimir Zelensky say if he were in the same position?” Then it became kind of easy to cut down, to be honest. “Oh: Alone, without help from the oppressor, a nation leading an army without arms.” Those were the things that would resonate. I thought people would think of that politically, but the reaction has been like, “Look, he’s still going!” [Laughs]

Once Upon a Time in Harlem premiere at the 64th New York Film Festival. Photo by Sean DiSerio.

The other powerful moment for me was the real lament from a few people that the younger generation had forgotten the significance of the people in that room. What did you make of that indictment at that time? Why did your generation struggle to remember these luminaries?

It wasn’t really spoken about. It wasn’t really studied. Students come up to me now and say, “Yeah, I had no idea this existed.” And I think that for us then—they had the Black Arts Movement. It was very much going on at that time. And I was reading a thing from Ishmael Reed. If they had seen the film at that time, they would have said, “Oh, those were revolutionaries. We’re just following their path.” So I think that would have been very illustrative. I think that would have had a big, big effect.

I suppose every generation kind of feels like they’re revolutionaries.

That’s right. “We’re important.” Yeah, there was other stuff going on.

When you look back at the salons and dialectics happening at that time, what do you miss most about it?

It reminds me of when I was growing up in my grandmother’s house. People would come over and talk when I was a little kid and you had the bridge parties, smoking, all that. And it took me back. It does remind you of that kind of period, those kinds of interactions. And I think that today, something like this may be happening, could be happening now, but there are no cameras there to record it. So that 50 years from now, people would say, “Oh, yeah, I didn’t know Barry Jenkins was thinking about this.” 

It seems like your dad never even had to play moderator with them.

Oh, yeah, no. These folks were ready to talk to each other. “Remember such and such and so-and-so and that.” We tried to put him in there whenever we could, whenever he was talking. And so [my dad] said, “What about so-and-so?” “What about the lynchings? What about this?” And they don’t speak about that, except for Richard Moore in his interview. They freelance. They spoke about what they wanted to speak about when they wanted to speak about it. He used them. But when he did that, we have his voice. When he says, “Oh, let Aaron Douglas talk about…” So you do hear him making those comments…

It’s a little conscientious, just to kind of make sure everyone is participating.

Yeah, exactly. And the librarians again played another significant role. “Everybody quiet down.” And they would usher people in, take people out, so they’re playing the same kind of role. There’s two of them—Jean Hutson and Regina Andrews—and needless to say, when they spoke, as Richard Moore says, “Nobody interrupts the librarian.” So they were very much respected, and when they wanted to move people around, they were able to do that.

The New Yorker critic Richard Brody has been a big champion of your dad’s work for years. He wrote that if William Greaves “had been able to complete the movie soon after shooting his footage, it would have literally changed the course of history, and for the better. It would have brought the Harlem Renaissance and its luminaries greater prominence during an era that was neglectful of those movements.” 

Right.

What do you make of that idea? Had your generation been able to watch a documentary like this, what impact do you think it would have made?

As I said before: I think that they would have realized that there was this previous time and these previous groups of people who were also very much interested in the arts, the time they were in, what was happening, the lynchings, and everything else. I think they would have been more respectful of their predecessors, and I think it would have changed. I’m not going to say “changed the course of history,” but it changed how they thought about themselves. And they would have appreciated and maybe stood up a little straighter and said, “Hey, we are part of something.” I think that would have happened.

I’m sure your dad has been with you in this whole filmmaking process. What did it feel like when this was completed? How do you think he would have felt about this? 

I think that he would have said, “That’s my boy. That’s my thing.” I think he would have appreciated the work.

That’s all you want to hear.

That’s all a son wants to hear. 

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is now in limited release.

The Criterion Channel’s three big retrospectives for November are not director-centric, but each comprise entire film histories of their own. A Nicolas Cage series spans some of his earliest films (Fast Times, Rumble Fish) to auteurist favorites (Adaptation, Wild at Heart, Bringing Out the Dead) to later oddities (The Wicker Man, Bad Lieutenant). Meanwhile, a Gene Tierney program is a who’s-who of mid-century auteur: Jacques Tourneur, Jules Dassin, Otto Preminger, John M. Stahl, Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Proving that auteurs come in more shapes and sizes, the late, great Jeremy Thomas is celebrated through his finest producing work: The Shout, Bad Timing, The Hit, Sexy Beast, The Last Emperor, EO, and Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence among them.

There are a few director programs, still. With All of a Sudden opening on November 25, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist, and Happy Hour (a good option for the Thanksgiving break) are newly packaged; Roy Andersson’s best-known films show alongside his lesser-seen 1970 feature A Swedish Love Story; and two features and three shorts from Mary Stephen are showcased, as are three documentaries by Bobbito García.

November is a major month fro Criterion Editions: The Last Waltz (surely timed to Thanksgiving), This Is Spinal Tap, Trainspotting, The Secret of the Grain, Welcome II the Terrordome, the aforementioned Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Rumble Fish, and Being John Malkovich. The latter is also featured in “From MTV to Hollywood,” which comprises films by David Fincher, Mark Romanek, Michel Gondry, recent Criterion anointee Mike Mills, Tamra Davis (with whom we recently had a massive conversation), Tarsem, and Hype Williams. In so doing, it offers something of an alt-history of Clinton-through-Bush Hollywood and, perhaps, roads not taken.

Meanwhile, Adventures In Moviegoing continues with music-video and TV director Hiro Murai. Restorations of Philip Hartman’s No Picnic and Geoff Murphy’s Utu Redux make streaming debuts

See the full list of films below and more at the Criterion Channel:

About Endlessness, Roy Andersson, 2019*

Adaptation., Spike Jonze, 2002

ATL, Chris Robinson, 2006

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Werner Herzog, 2009

Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze, 1999*

Belly, Hype Williams, 1998

Birdy, Alan Parker, 1984

A Body to Live In, Angelo Madsen, 2025

Bringing Out the Dead, Martin Scorsese, 1999*

CB4, Tamra Davis, 1993*

The Cell, Tarsem Singh, 2000

City of Angels, Brad Silberling, 1998

CQ, Roman Coppola, 2001

Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC, Bobbito García and Kevin Couliau, 2012

Dragonwyck, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946

Drunken Noodles, Lucio Castro, 2025

Duke of Groove, Griffin Dunne, 1995

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry, 2004*

Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Amy Heckerling, 1982*

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947

The Great Canadian Puberty Rite, Mary Stephen, 1974

Guncrazy, Tamra Davis, 1992

Happy Hour, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2015

Home of the Brave, Laurie Anderson, 1986

Human Nature, Michel Gondry, 2001

Labyrinthe, Mary Stephen, 1973

The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese, 1978

Laura, Otto Preminger, 1944

Leave Her to Heaven, John M. Stahl, 1945

Leaving Las Vegas, Mike Figgis, 1995

Manal Issa, 2024, Elisabeth Subrin, 2024

Maria Schneider, 1983, Elisabeth Subrin, 2022

Matchstick Men, Ridley Scott, 2003

Moonstruck, Norman Jewison, 1987

Never Let Me Go, Delmer Daves, 1953

Night and the City, Jules Dassin, 1950

No Picnic, Philip Hartman, 1986

Oh, Christmas Tree, Katie Aselton, 2024

One Hour Photo, Mark Romanek, 2002

Palimpsest: The Story of a Name, Mary Stephen, 2025

Peggy Sue Got Married, Francis Ford Coppola, 1986

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, Roy Andersson, 2014*

The President’s Analyst, Theodore J. Flicker, 1967*

Raising Arizona, Joel Coen, 1987

The Replacement Killers, Antoine Fuqua, 1998

Rings on Her Fingers, Rouben Mamoulian, 1942

Rock Rubber 45s, Bobbito García, 2018

Rumble Fish, Francis Ford Coppola, 1983*

The Secret of the Grain, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007

Se7en, David Fincher, 1995

Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer, 2000

Shades of Silk, Mary Stephen, 1978

Snake Eyes, Brian De Palma, 1998*

Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives, Bobbito García, 2015

A Swedish Love Story, Roy Andersson, 1970

That Wonderful Urge, Robert B. Sinclair, 1948

This Is Spinal Tap, Rob Reiner, 1984*

Thumbsucker, Mike Mills, 2005*

Trainspotting, Danny Boyle, 1996*

Two Gods, Zeshawn Ali, 2020

Utu Redux, Geoff Murphy, 2013

Valley Girl, Martha Coolidge, 1983

Vampire’s Kiss, Robert Bierman, 1988

A Very Easy Death, Mary Stephen, 1975

Way of a Gaucho, Jacques Tourneur, 1952

Where the Sidewalk Ends, Otto Preminger, 1950

The Wicker Man, Neil LaBute, 2006

Wild at Heart, David Lynch, 1990*

You, the Living, Roy Andersson, 2007

*Available in the U.S. only

Christine Haroutounian’s feature-directing debut, After Dreaming, has taken a long route towards New York exhibition. After premiering at the 2025 Berlinale, the film appeared at some festivals of high renown (Busan, Thessalonki) before finally landing a U.S. home at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies in 2026. Nearly seven months after that, the first New York showing of After Dreaming comes this Sunday, October 25 at Asia Society as part of an Armenian cinema retrospective whose programmer, Sona Karapoghosyan, deemed Haroutounian’s film a “surreal exploration of a patriarchal society inseparable from war.” With this occasion in mind, we’re pleased to exclusively unveil a massively intriguing trailer.

Here’s the official synopsis: “Armenia, before peace yet after war. A well-driller is mistaken as an enemy and killed in the countryside. Back in the city, his family decides to keep his death a secret from their daughter, Claudette. They ask a soldier, Atom, to take her away before the funeral. The next morning, Claudette returns from choir practice to find no one home but Atom. He reassures Claudette that her family is awaiting her at a remote monastery. On the road together, faces and places at the brink of disappearing come into existence just as they fall away.”

Watch the preview below:

It’s not even Halloween but already time to set your 2027 viewing calendar. Coming to Criterion on Blu-ray are Claire Denis’ feature debut, Chocolat, a film whose colors and textures demand a higher, and Mike Leigh’s Career Girls, which will resonate differently after the vision of female friendship in his great, potentially final film Tender Loving Care. New and on 4K is John Boorman’s Deliverance, with “Dueling Banjos” screeching in restored sound; upgrade-wise, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is jumping to 4K from its 2021 disc, while Midnight Cowboy is brought to full resolution for the first time since its 2018 debut.

The most essential release to start 2027, though, is a Blu-ray set of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project. The sixth edition of arguably Criterion’s finest ongoing project features Flora Gomes’ Morta Nega (from Guinea-Bissau), Luis Sérgio Person’s São Paulo, Incorporated (from Brazil), Timité Bassori’s The Woman with the Knife (from Côte d’Ivoire), and Bahram Beyzai’s The Stranger and the Fog (from Iran). Once on the edge of extinction, these films are given the ideal, as Richard Linklater would say, forever home.

See artwork below and more at Criterion:

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Film at Lincoln Center
Ken Russell’s reconstructed The Devils has begun playing on a restored 35mm print—read (or listen to) our interview with Mark Kermode on it.

Roxy Cinema
A program of Michel Auder’s works and 30th-anniversary screening of Karishika play on Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art
Films by Chantal Akerman screen in a Claire Atherton retrospective.

BAM
Ken Russell’s reconstructed The Devils has begun playing—read (or listen to) our interview with Mark Kermode on it.

Film Forum
An Andrzej Wajda series continues; Spy Kids shows on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives
Films by Eisenstein screen in Essential Cinema.

Museum of the Moving Image
A Michael Cocoyannis retrospective runs this weekend; Fantasia and Murnau’s Faust also play.

IFC Center
Ken Russell’s reconstructed The Devils has begun playing on a restored 35mm print—read (or listen to) our interview with Mark Kermode on it—while The Exorcist, The House with Laughing Windows, and Redline play late.

Nitehawk Prospect Park
The Addams Family and a print of Vampire’s Kiss screen early on Saturday and Sunday.

Metrograph
Midnight in Paris, Strangers on a Train, and The Aristocats show on 35mm while Paris is a Woman starts showing in a restoration; Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Trains: Local Routes, Classical Cinema, and Darius Khondji continue.

Welcome to The B-Side! Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between. 

Our subject today is the weird, handsome, and weirdly handsome James Spader! The B-Sides are White Palace, 2 Days in the Valley, Critical Care, and Slow Burn. Our guest is Veronica Fitzpatrick, editor of the new book In the Mood? As described on the A24 website: “From flirtation and foreplay to all-out kink, In the Mood? offers a menu of over 100 erotic movie recommendations.” There are THREE Spader films featured in the book, including White Palace! 

We talk about what a great on-screen listener Spader is, his bravery in going bald in Hollywood, his sexiness through the years, and that White Palace tagline (“The story of a younger man and a bolder woman”). Additional Spader movie recs include Bad Influence and The Music of Chance.

The silent film masterpiece Greed comes up (the inspiration for Slow Burn), as does the recent New York Film Festival, and the untapped lunacy of 1990s cinema.

Listen below and subscribe here. Be sure to give us a follow on Bluesky at @tfsbside.bsky.social. Enjoy!

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Buddy (Casper Kelly)

A mix of Barney and Blue’s Clues, the TV program Buddy follows a large pink unicorn who, alongside a supporting cast of anthropomorphized house objects, teaches the program’s children a new lesson each episode. All of the show’s elements—the colorful sets, the ’90s outfits the children wear, the songs they sing—point to Kelly’s deep understanding of the aesthetics and rules of the world that he subverts. – Caleb H. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

The Death of Robin Hood (Michael Sarnoski)

How many times has the story of Robin Hood been told? How many books have been written, how many movies made about the outlaw? With The Death of Robin Hood, writer-director Michael Sarnoski goes back to the source. Rather, the supposed sources. The earliest stories of Robin Hood were ballads told by commoners across England. These tales tell of an outlaw who does not give anything stolen to the poor, instead taking pleasure in killing the rich. In the medieval ballad “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne,” Robin beheads Gisborne and sticks his head on a spike. – Dan M. (full review)

Where to Stream: HBO Max

Hanging by a Wire (Mohammed Ali Naqvi)

A brisk docu-thriller that could do more with the richness of the players it chronicles, Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s Hanging by a Wire is not without thrills and human drama. Yet it seems focused more on a death-defying rescue than on what could be done to prevent this from happening again. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Hope (Na Hong-jin)

It’s never night in Hope Harbor. At least so long as we’re there. The eschatological events of writer-director Na Hong-Jin’s high-octane, highly anticipated Hope unfold over the course of one long, grueling, nonstop chase of a day for its rag-tag team of small-town South Korean cops, yokels, and hicks, an ensemble that ranges from heroic to hilarious in this blathering creature-feature phantasm. – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

In the Mouth (Cory Santilli)

One of the most impressive American indies I’ve seen in the last year sets Free Time and Dad & Step-Dad star Colin Burgess in a surreal comedy. Cory Santilli’s In the Mouth premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival and has now arrived digitally.

Where to Stream: Fandor

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)

The films of Mark Jenkin ooze a hypnotic, seasick sensibility; to watch them is to be lulled by their restless jumps through time and space, their ability to convert his home turf of Cornwall into a suspended world where facts and visions collide in stupefying dioramas. The director is a spinner of wandering tales, never fueled by linear plots so much as ambient forces: a ticking clock, gusts of wind, the distant roaring of waves. His dramas tend to pull your gaze from people and toward the inanimate objects that litter their surroundings. It’s here––in the interstice between the fictional foreground and non-fictional background––that the actual story often lies. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Where to Stream: MUBI

Sacrifice (Romain Gavras)

It’s not too grand a statement to say the environment you watch a film in will heavily impact how you feel about it. This was the case with Sacrifice, a supposed satire of the uber-rich and celebrity worship that, viewed in the context of a film festival’s gala world premiere where every big name in the credits was accompanied by hooting from the audience, couldn’t help ringing a little false. – Ethan V. (full review)

Where to Stream: Netflix

The Sun Never Sets (Joe Swanberg)

It’s been nearly a decade since Joe Swanberg last sat in the director’s chair. What does the preeminent king of mumblecore have up his sleeve now? More of the same, essentially. For those familiar with work such as Drinking Buddies, Digging for Fire, and Happy Christmas, the filmmaker’s The Sun Never Sets won’t pack many surprises; his low-budget, loose rhythm in assembling a set of characters and placing them under a quasi-rom-com premise to bicker and banter remains firmly intact. – Mitchell B. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Also New to Streaming

AMC+

Night Nurse

Apple TV

Tenzing

HBO Max

Free Leonard Peltier

Kino Film Collection

Dracula’s Fiancée

Prime Video

Love of Your Life

We’re thrilled to announce that Factory 25, the celebrated Brooklyn-based independent film distribution company, has acquired world rights on Jaclyn Bethany’s acclaimed drama In Transit, starring Alex Sarrigeorgiou (who also wrote the script), François Arnaud (Heated Rivalry), and Jennifer Ehle. Winner of the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at NewFest, Factory 25 will give the film a theatrical release beginning November 1 and a digital debut on December 1. Ahead of the roll-out, we’re pleased to debut the exclusive trailer and poster.

Here’s the synopsis: “In a small town in Maine, Lucy tends bar at the local dive where she’s worked for years, content in the rhythms of her quiet life with her longtime boyfriend, Tom. But when Ilse, a mysterious older artist adrift in her own life, asks Lucy to model for her, each woman stirs in the other the possibility of a different kind of meaning. Just as Lucy learns the bar is being sold and the life she’s built may be slipping away, she has to reckon with what she truly wants.”

One of the themes that interests me most as a filmmaker is intimacy between women,” said Jaclyn Bethany. “It is quite simply something we do not see enough on screen. When I received the script for In Transit I was instantly transported to Lucy and Ilse’s world — two women from completely different backgrounds who are brought together by fate, art and desire. Alex’s script is beautiful, subtle and thought provoking. I knew I wanted to direct this film. The film presents a study of a relationship that we may have seen before, (an artist and muse) but subsequently turns this relationship on its head. With a poetic approach and artistic lens, every frame is carefully chosen, every word precisely spoken. In Transit explores a unique and invigorating relationship between two women, exploring many aspects of femininity, female sexuality and the vulnerability of womanhood – both through our bodies and minds. The film is a chamber piece, rotating solely around two strong women and their desires. I believe most women can see aspects of themselves through each character.”

See the exclusive trailer and poster below.

There are holy grails, and then there’s The Devils. While Ken Russell’s 1971 film has been available in some form or another for decades, many (like me) always avoided it—not for its scandalous content, but for the lack of such. In a rare class of studio films that passed through the era of director’s cut DVDs without proper restoration, it’s long seemed destined for cinematic purgatory.

That has changed in a manner so drastic it’s like everybody’s making up for lost time. With the creation of their new label, Clockwork, Warner Bros. announced a restoration of the full, uncut iteration for widespread release on 35mm that was preceded by a splashy Cannes world premiere that sold out in seconds. It happened in no small part because of The Devils’ biggest champion, Mark Kermode, who has spent decades on the front line for Russell’s vision. With Kermode in town for a U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival, I had the pleasure of partaking in a long, impassioned conversation with (literally) one of the most famous voices in film.

Two notes: 1) Kermode told me after our conversation that his white whale is a complete restoration of the director’s cut of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III; 2) at some point I misuse the term “begs the question.” I could feel myself making the mistake in real time, yet it slipped out. We regret the error.

Listen to or read our conversation below and subscribe here.

Music courtesy of Lex Walton: “Love Theme from an Unreleased Film” from the album Giving It Up.

The Film Stage: After years and years and hours and hours of hearing your voice, it’s nice to meet you.

Mark Kermode: I can only apologize.

It’s a good voice. I think if you had a bad voice, you wouldn’t have the career you’ve had.

Well, thank you. Well, when I was a kid, my father only ever gave me two pieces of advice, which was: “Learn to speak properly and stop watching all those films.” So I think that I ended up making a living speaking improperly about all those films was a bit of a crushing disappointment to him.

I was going to say 50% and that’s better than a lot of parent-child expectations.

Yeah.

The publicist asked me what I think is probably like a big question today, which is: have you seen The Devils before?

Have I seen it before?

No, have I seen…

Oh, yeah, sorry, yes. [Laughs] I thought you…

It’s crazy if you’ve…

Yeah, that would be wild, wouldn’t it? I’ve been bluffing all day. I’ve been doing really well.

And the answer that I had for her was: before the press screening on Tuesday, I hadn’t. And I hadn’t exactly because I was waiting for the occasion of Tuesday, which is the full version, uncut, in a theater; it being on a 35mm print was actually more than I would have reasonably hoped for even six months ago. Right? And it was a very special experience. I mean, you know as well as anybody how important where you sit in the theater can be. I sat in the front row of the Walter Reade, which is a good front row because it gives you enough space. But I sat in the front row to the side.

Is that where it is tomorrow night? Is that the Walter? Because I haven’t been in there yet. But I hear it’s a very good auditorium.

Yeah. It’s my favorite theater in New York.

Okay, great. And they say that there’s not a bad seat in the house.

I don’t think there is.

Great.

Front row to the side, it’s like this. And, probably from the first shot, I was just aware this was worth the wait, essentially. So this is an amazing occasion. Just doing the early research, I Googled “Mark Kermode The Devils.”

Okay.

And there comes up this YouTube video, “What To Do About The Devils“ from 2014.

Right.

Where you’re talking about the problem that exists at hand. Now that it’s here, what are some of the feelings that you have outside of the obvious “I’m happy it’s here,” the sense of the history that has been resolved, the sense of it’s going to be seen by people, now that you’ve had the experience of actually premiering it, like where’s your head at with it?

Well, partly, I still keep pinching myself because I can’t quite believe it’s happening. When the premiere happened at Cannes, which was in May, I was there with and I introduced the film with Lisi, Ken’s wife. And both Lisi and I had a moment before the film started, which was: we looked at each other and went, “Is this actually happening?” Because we had become so convinced that it would not happen. And so part of me is still kind of like, I’m still delighted, but also kind of slightly disbelieving that it’s happening because it has been such a long time. I first met Ken in ’95. I said to him, “Oh, we’ll find the missing scenes,” and he said, “No, you won’t. They’re gone, you know, they’re gone. They’re lost.” We found the missing scenes, in the beginning of the 21st century. We had them in a documentary in 2002. We had them in the DigiBeta, director’s cut in 2004. That was 22 years ago. So 22 years passed, that 2014 was like midway between them, and I think that we had all just resigned ourselves to the fact that it wasn’t going to happen, that what was going to happen was what had happened—that we had done the DigiBeta restoration, but that was that was the end of it. And honestly, I had just thought, “Okay, well, well, look, we did that, and let’s take the win.” Ken was there when we did that screening. It was brilliant, it was really good, but it’s not going to happen.

And then Spencer and Christian got in touch and said, “We formed this new label within Warner, and we’re doing The Devils director’s cut.” And, it was like, “Really?” Just like that. I spent a lot of time thinking, “What changed?” And I honestly think that what happened was: when The Devils came out, it caused such a furor, but also it got such a lot of flak for things that were just completely unfairly thrown at it. You know, “Oh, it’s disgusting, sensationalist, blasphemous, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And the cutting of the film—both by the censors and also by the studio at the time—sort of wounded Ken. He was really genuinely upset about it because he had taken the film very seriously. And we had sort of done a partial fix by getting the footage and showing that the film could be assembled in a version. The actual thing of it being restored properly to what it should have looked like is, even now, these months on from Cannes, I can’t quite believe it. So on the one hand: I’m immensely proud and I’m immensely happy that it’s happened; and on the other hand, there’s just a part of me that thinks, “Okay, how did we get…?”

The honest truth of it is: we got here because Spencer [Collantes] and Christian [Parkes] arrived at Warner Bros. and said, “We really want to do The Devils.” And because of the work that they had done at NEON… look, I am a 63-year-old man, right? Me obsessing about The Devils it’s like, “Yeah, well, I knew Ken. I promised Ken that we’d do this.” You know, “Okay, that’s fine, that’s just Mark being Mark, you know.” When Spencer and Christian—off the work thing, the success that they had at Neon—came to us and said, “We really want to do The Devils,” I think that they went, “Oh, okay.” They’re smart. They’ve got their ear to the ground. They’ve got their finger on the pulse of what is happening now, which I don’t have; I’m an old man. And I think that that’s what changed, was that the kind of lack of enthusiasm for The Devils, which had really kind of dogged it throughout its history, was turned around by Spencer and Christian saying, “You know…” That’s a terrible phrase, but they’re young gunslingers and they come into town and go, “We think The Devils is really important.” And I think that they went, “Okay.”

From what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong, but [WB] were nothing but supportive. And what it took was for them just to hear the right people say, “We think this is a really good idea.” And then, suddenly, it was a really good idea. Then there’s part of me that goes, “Oh, it was that simple.” It reminds me of the bit at the end of The Wizard of Oz when she says, “Yeah, you always had the ability to go home.” “The whole time?” Yeah. That’s what it took.

Mark Kermode and Lisi Tribble at the 64th New York Film Festival. Photo by Sean DiSerio.

Bit of a deus ex machina. Me being as a cinephile, you have your white whales, the movies that you never get to see or you never get to see in their purest form. Like, a lot of people are haunted by the thought of the longer Magnificent Ambersons, for instance, or like, last year I got to see one of my white whales, which is Patrick Tims’ Love Massacre, when it premiered at the Tokyo International Film Festival. And sometimes there’s that feeling where you finally see it and it’s not disappointing per se, but it is also a movie and a fixed runtime, and then it’s over, right? Which I think is maybe what partly what you’re getting at a little bit, that feeling of you can’t believe it and then suddenly it’s just happening. 

Yeah, but I don’t feel like it’s just a movie and a runtime and then it’s over. I kind of feel like it’s out in the world finally. I mean, you’ve got to remember: I have thought about this for a really long time. I mean, not as long as Ken did, obviously

Sure.

For about a really, really long time. And every time, I mean… when I saw it in the Cannes premiere and it just looked astonishing. I mean, it just looked amazing. I hadn’t seen the restored version until it was in Cannes. And I was sitting there with Lisi [Tribble, Ken Russell’s widow] and we were both looking at each other going, “Did you know?” And I am really looking forward to tomorrow night. And somebody said to me, “You’re going to watch it again?” “Yes. Yes.” I’ve only seen it this good once. I now need to sit. I’d seen it 25, 30 times in the late-night circuit when I was watching the film and some old 35mm print in some butchered version. So, there’s no sense to me of, you know, “That’s it. It’s done now. It’s finished.” What I feel like is “That’s it. It’s done now. It’s beginning.” And what I really am excited to know is what happens now.

What will happen is that I will keep going back and seeing it every time. There’ll now be the release thing that would be great, and I will keep going back to see it because there is something about it as a complete film now that is the beginning of a story rather than the end of a story. And part of me thinks, what would it have been like if the film had been released like this in 1971?

Right.

Would people have understood it better? Would it have made more sense? I don’t, I don’t know. It was in one of the interviews I did earlier today, somebody said, “It’s like the film was waiting for the world to catch up with it.”

Definitely.

And I think the world hasn’t quite caught up with it yet. I think it’s closer than it was before. It was funny because of when Billy Friedkin did the re-cut of The Exorcist for “the version you’d never seen,” that I had written about the missing scenes, and the last sentence of the book that I wrote for the BFI about The Exorcist was —paraphrasing—we can only be tantalized by Bill Blatty’s suggestion that there was a better version of the film. And I took the line from—me being a hack—but I took the line from the publicity of the film: I said, “That thought is almost beyond comprehension” because the tagline for the film was, “Something almost beyond comprehension is happening to a girl in this house.” Dot, dot, dot—you know, dramatic flourish.

And then the stuff got put back in again. And that’s what I know about the closure thing: you go, “Oh, there we are.” There we are. And then people now said to me, “Well, is it better?” And the answer is, “No, it’s different.”

Okay.

“Okay, it’s different. It’s not better, it’s different.” In the case of The Devils, is it better? Yes. It is. It was damaged goods before. It had a big problem before because it was damaged. And now it isn’t damaged anymore. So, it’s not like in the case of The Exorcist—there wasn’t that sense of closure that you’re talking about. “Oh, okay, that’s it. That’s the thing that I was dreaming about.” In the case of this, I always knew that there was something wrong with it because the first time I ever spoke to Ken about it, he said to me, “It’s damaged goods.” That was the phrase that he used. He said, because they just took this stuff out of it, that left it with a hole. Something is damaged about it, and then you put it back in and go, “No, that is better. That is what it always should have looked like.”

Right.

And John Phillips—the theologian—said, fascinatingly, when he first saw the film, it was in Ken’s cut with the Rape of Christ sequence in it. And he said, “Despite the fact that that sequence was cut out, and it was never in the film from the release until now,” he said, in his mind, it was always there, because in his mind, it was part of the film. It was like, you know, it was.

I get it.

“But the rest of us had to wait to see what it was meant to look like.” So I kind of feel like now, after all this time, it’s finally being released for the first time. It’s like the things that people have seen of it up until now are sort of a trailer, but this is actually the film.

Sure.

Well, that’s so pretentious. I’m so sorry.

No, no, no, I think that’s great. I mean, because I think you’re speaking with enthusiasm. And I think sometimes enthusiasm and pretension get confused for each other. I want to circle back, because this is all on my mind, as you’re saying, “This is what the film should have looked like.” What was the DigiBeta of it?

So the DigiBeta that we had in 2000—in, whatever it was, 2000—when we were making Hell on Earth, we had found the missing scenes. We had found the reel of film that had the missing scenes on it, and we had digitized that. And we had put those scenes in Hell on Earth. So the first time the missing scenes were ever shown was on the Channel 4 documentary Hell on Earth, in which we had all those scenes in. The DigiBeta was a digital version of the British X-rated version, which had sort of disappeared from view, because the film opened in the UK with the British X rating. It was then further cut for the American version. So the American version was always shorter than the British version.

Okay, I see.

After the film had done its first run in cinemas, the British X-rated prints seemed to disappear and be superseded by the American R-rated prints. So for example: when I first saw the film, which was in either ’79 or ’80, either the winter of ’79 or… oh, the spring of ’80, the version that I saw, the version that was on the late-night circuit, was the American R-rated version. It had a British exit certificate at the beginning of it, but it wasn’t the British version; it was the American R-rated version. In fact, the British X-rated version was pretty much out of circulation until the late 1990s.

So we had the DigiBeta of the film in its most complete version, which was the British X-rated version. It was that version into which Mike Bradwell, who was the editor of both The Devils and of our documentary, re-inserted the two key sequences, which is the Rape of Christ sequence and the sequence with Sister Jeanne and the bone. But it was a digital video. So when we projected it onto screen one of the National Film Theater, it looked like a video projection. I mean, it was good, but it was a video.

Yes.

And the time that you noticed it the most was in those scenes when Grandier is addressing the crowd and the walls of Loudun, the white walls and the tiling inside. You know what Digi looks like?

I do. Terrible.

It goes a bit squiggly. And you were looking at it thinking, “It’s like watching it through a glass darkly. I can see that there… I can see that there is a brilliant thing there, but it’s.. it’s slightly obscured.” But what was fascinating was: at least you could see that that was what the film was meant to look like, but you had to kind of make the sort of leap of imagination as to what it would look like.

Yes.

When we finally saw the restoration, it was… I mean, Guillermo Del Toro has said this. It’s like, what was the comparison that he used? He said it was like cleaning the Sistine Chapel with saliva. And it was like, it was literally like, “Oh,” because: right. I quote this all the time, my friend Nigel Floyd, the film critic, says this thing the documentary Hell on Earth, and it’s my favorite comment about The Devils, and I repeat it all the time and people look at me like I’m being foolish. He said the thing about it is: it is a film which is a film. And what he meant by that is: it’s a film that is not a script. It is a film that is a film. It being a film quality was what it looked like.

Right.

And so up until the point of the restoration, it hadn’t actually looked like… so when it was first out in pristine print, fine, but the pristine prints were cut. And so therefore, there was something missing. Then when we finally restored it, fine, it had the rhythm, but it was from a DigiBeta. So finally, after all this time of imagining it, “Oh, that’s what it looks like.” And the Cannes thing was literally like we were just all sitting there going… I’ve imagined it, but it’s there. It’s better, or even better because you can’t quite describe—I can’t, because I’m not very good with words—you can’t quite describe in words what it does, because it is a film which is a film. Does that make any sense at all?

Behind the scenes of The Devils

Well, it’s funny. This resonates exactly with two things I was thinking while I was seeing the film. One is, like I said, sometimes when you encounter the white whale, it’s because it’s finally been restored. Other times, it’s a movie that you do know well, but you’ve only seen it on DVD or VHS, and when you see the restoration—I’ve had this thought multiple times—you literally didn’t know it could look like that.

Yeah, fine. You said it better.

Like, I thought it was embossed in amber as what the film looks like, and then… that’s insanely gratifying. But also the thing you say about “a film that looks like a film,” which is that I love all kinds of cinema, and I know that sometimes there’s a place for grandiosity, sometimes there’s a place for the homemade. But it kind of brought me back to this experience, with all that being said, of when I saw the final cut of Apocalypse Now at the Beacon Theater here in New York, which is a… I mean, it’s not even really a movie theater, that’s how big the screen is.

Okay.

And you’re sitting there and you’re watching it, and there’s something about a solidity of the image, on an image-by-image basis, of a certain force of detail, which, now I’m sounding pretentious. But there is something about that experience of: this is made in such a way, with such a density of image that goes beyond what we usually think of in film. I think especially as cinephiles, there’s this idea of sometimes you fetishize the thing that looks ugly or small, because that’s more dignified than something that’s big and grand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But a movie like The Devils for me, those two streams cross.

Yes, I think that’s right. So the final cut of Apocalypse Now, does it have the plantation stuff in it? Does it have—

It does.

Fine. Okay.

And it was a great experience seeing it, because it was at the premiere, so nobody had seen it, and you could feel the air kind of suck out of the room when people realized it was going to stay in.

That’s interesting.

I kind of like that scene, and he also did a good job saying, like, “I like it too,” because he did a Q&A after. He was like, “I like it too, I want to keep it in.” But it was a funny experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The interpolation thing is… I mean, the point you’re making about the sort of the deeper thing about looking at the image—you said it better than I did—the solidity of it, there’s something about Ken’s filmmaking when he is, and actually this kind of relates slightly to Apocalypse Now, it is very hard now to imagine a filmmaker being funded to make a film as out-there as The Devils was, because The Devils does not look like a film that anyone sat around and workshopped. Ken wrote the script for The Devils in a matter of weeks. He literally sat down and it came out of him, like he had the two books, he had the Whiting and he had the Huxley, and he just wrote. And then he had access to these sets and the sets were big, and it was a very, very big kind of ballroom set. And then he has access to the very finest acting talent—Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave, Dudley Sutton, Michael Rainsford, and Georgina Hale. It’s extraordinary.

And then he has Peter Maxwell Davies doing the score, like literally the cutting-edge avant-garde composer of his stuff. All these things and then the costume by Shirley Russell, all these things together, it is hard to imagine a studio doing that again now. The only comparison I can think of is—recently, for example—Paul Thomas Anderson made One Battle After Another, and everyone was going, “It is astonishing that they allowed that amount of money to be spent on a movie that’s that adventurous.” And, okay, did well, but it’s a risk.

Sure.

In the case of The Devils, it’s like: the thing that is really remarkable about it is, it is a film that looked like, when he made it, was untrammeled. And then once he’d done it, they went, “No, no, no, sorry. No, no, no.” And then they had to start taking bits out of it, whereas now you’d think what would happen in advance is: you wouldn’t be able to make it in the first place. I don’t know. Maybe things are changing, because you hear people talking now about studios actually returning to a kind of auteur-driven thing, but it was a singular vision of a singular filmmaker who made films that were in a style that was very much his own, and he was allowed to do it, and then it was messed up after the fact.

Behind-the-scenes contiunity photos from The Devils.

I mean, there was applause in the end credits for Derek Jarman, too, from the audience, and it sort of begets the question: why isn’t every film set designed by someone of Jarman’s caliber?

Well, partly because not every filmmaker who’s making a a fairly decently budgeted studio movie would have the guts that Ken had, because the way that Ken got Derek Jarman—Ken told me this story—was he said that a friend of his had said, “I was on a train, I met this guy called Derek Jarman, he’s really interesting, I know you’re looking for a new look on The Devils, you should go see him.” So Ken goes, “Okay.” So Ken goes to Derek Jarman’s studio, which is on the banks of the Thames, and it’s this great big warehouse, and he walks in and it’s freezing cold, and in the middle of it, there is a greenhouse with Derek Jarman sitting in it with a two-bar electric fire, and all the way around the walls are this exhibition of his see-through Cardinal’s coats, and one of them’s filled with dollars, and one of them’s filled with stuff that he found washed up in the Thames, and one of them’s, you know…

And Ken looks at these things, and he goes, “This guy’s got ideas,” and he sits, and he talks to Derek Jarman for hours, and he just goes, “Yep, him. Him. Come and design this massive studio production that we’re making at Pinewood Studios, in which we’re literally going to build Loudun. Do that.” That is the risk. It’s like, not only did Ken take the risk—he was able to take the risk. He was able to go, “Yeah, I’m going to make this movie with this guy. You haven’t heard of him, but I think he’s a genius.” I was talking to somebody earlier on, saying there is an argument for saying that The Devils is Derek Jarman’s first feature, right? Because it is a Derek Jarman movie in the same way that it’s a Ken Russell movie. And it’s funny now that everybody celebrates the thing about, “You know, it’s Derek Jarman,” and his name comes across the screen every because, of course, it’s Derek Jarman, but at the time, nobody knew who Derek Jarman was—he was just Ken thought, “No, he’s brilliant, he’ll do it.”

Yeah, if it was very similar to it in minimalist, people would see Derek Jarman at the end and go, “Oh. Oh, strange, okay.” A few things to branch off from there, but I watched this video of you and Russell doing a Q&A about the film probably 20 or so years ago, and towards the end there’s an interesting conversation you guys had about the concept of kitsch.

Yeah.

And he said, which I think is a good quote, “Kitsch is fine.” And you’re also talking about the film coming out now and you’re wondering how the response is going to be. This not just advocate, but this kind of shepherd for the film, do you feel confident about how a fresh audience is going to respond to it? Or is confidence not even part of it? Is concern not part of it? It goes into the world and people respond how they do?

Well, I’ll be honest with you: I am incredibly bullheaded. Right? I have always thought it was a masterpiece, sure. And I have never understood anyone not thinking that. Ken and I bonded when I first met him because it’s quite easy to bond with somebody who tells you that the film that you’ve made that caused you no manner of trouble, just goes, “No, I think it’s a work of genius and I think you’re a genius and I think it’s a masterpiece and I think we have to put it back together again and fix it.” There is no part of me that doubts for one minute that the film is a masterpiece. I have been very aware of the fact that it was a wrongly maligned masterpiece, of which there have been many over the history of cinema. I’ve never, ever doubted that it was anything other than a masterpiece. The real delight has been this sort of growing groundswell of other voices saying the same thing.

So some time ago, Sight and Sound did one of those polls of everyone’s favorite movies. There were only two people then who put The Devils in their top 10. It was me, and the other one was Alex Cox. And that was 20, however many years ago it was. And then over the years, other voices start to join in, and then when we did the restoration, at the end people were very interested and then Guillermo [Del Toro] is talking about his love for Ken Russell—as a longstanding love for Ken Russell. So okay, there’s a rising tide of voices that the film is much better than perhaps its initial review. So by the time we get to this point, it’s like I’m thinking, “Everyone who knows anything knows that the film is a masterpiece. And if you don’t think it’s a masterpiece, you’re wrong.”

Sure.

But when we got to Cannes, there is the moment just before the film starts, and then it comes on the screen, and literally it comes on the screen with the theatrical production of the Venus thing, and you can hear people going, “Sorry, which film is this? The opening… is this how The Devils opens?” Because people think of the play; they don’t think of that. And so after that Cannes screening, the response was so rapturous, it was just like, “Oh, well, there we go. Of course. There we are. That’s it.” But there’s no part of me that feels any nervousness about how it will… I’m sure that there will be some people who will react negatively to it, some people will react positively to it, as is always the case with any movie at all. But I have no doubt that it is a film that will command serious attention and will be taken seriously, as it always should have been.

But that’s partly because I am very pigheaded, and I have believed that since I first saw it. I mean, there was a lot of bad stuff written about The Devils. Reviews when it first came out accused it of all manner of terrible things. And you read the BBFC reports, they thought it was disgraceful and disgusting, and you go, “No, it isn’t. It is a work of art.” And so yeah, no: I don’t feel any anxiety or worry about it at all. I was delighted by how it played in Cannes, but I kind of think like the world has caught up with it and that, if I’m really honest with you, the way that I feel right now is smug. “See? They flew you across the ocean to be here.”

You should be. You know, anytime I get put on a paid flight, I’m feeling so smug. And I’m not getting the honors.

But it is just that kind of thing. It’s just like, “See? There’s the evidence, right?” Because there were times when I was at Time Out in the 1980s, one of my editors said to me once, “Your problem is that you don’t believe that there is such a… you think…” No, the exact phrase was, said, “Your problem is that you believe that all art is redeemable.” And I said, “What do you—what do you even mean by that?” And they said, “Well, you just, you believe things.” And they were speaking, as it happened, about a conversation we had about Caligula, right? Because I had said somewhere in the middle of the car crash of a movie that is Caligula, there is a half-decent film struggling to get out. Well, I don’t know whether you saw the Caligula recut from a couple of years ago.

I did not.

It’s really good. And I did an interview with Malcolm McDowell, because over the years I had been involved in sort of various [ways]. Now, Caligula is never going to be a masterpiece. I’m not comparing The Devils to Caligula, but there was something in there, which was really Malcolm McDowell’s performance. And I had interviewed Malcolm McDowell, and he had talked about the heartbreak of it, that he had given this performance, and then it had turned into Caligula—this spectacular car crash of a film. And then when this new recut finally got done—it was a couple of years ago; two, three years ago—he said for the first time ever, he was able to go, “See? That’s what I thought we were doing.”

Yeah.

And so there’s part of me that just thinks when you—having said for such a long time that The Devils is a masterpiece—I never said Caligula was a masterpiece. Having said for a long time that The Devils is a masterpiece—it is Ken Russell’s best film, it is Ken Russell’s most underrated and misunderstood film—and now I literally feel like going, “See?” Sorry. When you transcribe this, it will just be Mark saying “See” over and over again.

I think the emphasis on it will be good. I mean, it’s funny because you met Russell in the mid-90s, which means you probably knew him for the last 15 or so years of his life. There’s an interesting question about the filmmaker-critic relationship. I think it’s interesting because you are very renowned as a critic, but you also have historian, advocate—there are a few hats that I think you wear. And how does your relationship with a director’s filmography change when you form your relationship with the director? It’s not like you necessarily love or even like every film that they’ve made, but are you looking at their films through a particular, different lens once you know them as a person?

So when I met Ken in 1995, his feature-film career had pretty much finished. At that point, he was what he referred to as a “garagist” because he made films in his garage. And he made independent films that were, like, absolutely independently funded because he couldn’t get money to make features. He didn’t have ideas—he did, but the British film industry was not very kind to Ken in his later years. So by the time I met him, the body of work existed substantially in terms of his feature films. And I knew what I thought about those films, because I had seen The Devils and Tommy and Women in Love and Music Lovers and Marlor and The Devils and Crimes of Passion and I had seen all the films, and I knew what I thought about them.

So it wasn’t like I was going to meet Ken and it was going to radically change the way I thought about the films, because I already kind of knew how I did think about them. The other thing was that, despite the fact that I knew Ken pretty well over the 15 years, I never stopped being a fan. I couldn’t quite believe that we were going round to Ken’s house. I couldn’t quite believe that I was on first-name terms with Ken. I mean, it was like literally for 15, 16 years, I had to keep pinching myself and going, “It’s Ken Russell in my kitchen.” You know, “We’re going to the pub with Ken Russell. I’m doing an onstage with Ken Russell.”

Absolutely.

And although people find it quite hard to believe, the same was true of Billy Friedkin. I never, ever got over the fact that Billy, he gave me a copy of, I think, the Cruising soundtrack, and he wrote a thing in it, which said, you know, “Thanks for all your support over the years, and your friendship.”

And I was like, “Are we friends?” You know, but because the imbalance was never going away. It was never going because he was—he was Billy Friedkin. He made The Exorcist and Sorcerer and films that were really, really good. Now, that didn’t mean that I loved everything he did. I didn’t. There were plenty of films that he made that weren’t to my liking. I didn’t like The Guardian one bit. I didn’t like Deal of the Century, an absolute mess of a film. Total mess of a film. I mean, it’s a weird thing, because Billy always said, “Yeah, it was a great script,” but it… and you think, “Really?” But so he made plenty of films that I didn’t like. It didn’t matter. It didn’t in any way affect what I thought about him as a filmmaker, and it didn’t affect what he thought about me, because it wasn’t like he didn’t know, because the stuff was all published. So there were some films of his that I really liked that he couldn’t quite understand why I really liked them.

Right.

So in the case of Ken, there are things that Ken did that, I think that we know, are more important than some other things that he did. But when you look at some of the later work, like Lair of the White Worm is now a film that people really love as a cult movie.

The Devils

It shows up on streaming every October for horror programming.

And I bet people watch it and go, “Wow, you ever seen Lair of the White Worm?” And that was a film which, when it first came out, people didn’t think, “Oh, that’s a film that’s going to last, however many years it’s been.” But now it is an absolute die-hard cult classic. And I think that probably when I first met Ken and we talked about his movies, that wasn’t one of the movies that I talked to him about, because I was talking to him about Women in Love and The Devils and all the rest of it.

I see.

But even when, after all those years we had known each other, I was still a Ken Russell fanboy. So I don’t think it fundamentally changed anything because if somebody is a great filmmaker and they make a bad film, it doesn’t make them a bad filmmaker.

Sure.

And one of the things that people say is like, “Well, if you like a filmmaker, then you are much more inclined to be kind to their work.” To which the answer is: “Yeah. That’s how it works.” If you think that somebody is an admirable filmmaker and they make a bad film, it’s more interesting than if somebody who isn’t an admirable filmmaker makes a bad film because people’s failures are kind of interesting. If you believe that the intent, the intention, the artistic ambition is worthy, that does affect how you think about films. So yes: when people say, “Well, you tend to be kinder to the films of directors that you like,” yeah, but it’s not I like them personally. I got to know them because I like their work.

And that’s the case with both Billy Friedkin and with Ken Russell: I got to know them because I was obsessed with their work, and I wrote about their work, and then I was privileged to meet them and make documentaries about them. As a result of that, we had a relationship that, on one level, you could define as a friendship, but on another level—and Ken, God bless him, was really good about this. He knew that if he was going to spend an evening with Mark, half of that evening was going to be taken up with Mark going, “Now, Ken, tell me: when you did Women in Love, what lenses were you using with that?” That requires a certain amount of patience, because as anybody who is a great artist knows, you don’t necessarily want to be surrounded by your greatest fan. It must get quite annoying.

Chris Farley and Paul McCartney.

Yeah.

Yeah, I’ve caught myself doing it too.

Yeah, and it’s really hard not to. Because it’s Ken Russell and you’re just having a nice time, and then you go, “Okay, you know that scene in Altered States…”

What you’re saying about the “fundamentally more interesting”—I mean, that’s point origin for a concept of auteurism, as Truffaut wrote about it before he ever shot a frame of film. He said, a bad film by a great filmmaker is more interesting than any… and I think you still see people blanch at that a little bit, and I think it’s interesting because it gets into this level of… it’s not about biases necessarily, or lowering your critical faculties, but I think it’s this strange median point between critical faculties and a sort of unbridled enthusiasm. It’s this weird place where they meet.

Yeah. But I honestly think that one of the things I find very hard is the idea of objective criticism. Criticism is not objective, right? It is personal. Now, there are things about it that are objective: being factually correct about a movie. Like, one of the things that Ken was so incensed about Alex Walker’s review of The Devils in the Evening Standard—and you know the famous story that Alex Walker really didn’t like the film—Ken was incensed because there were two things that Alex Walker said in the review that did not happen in the film. One of them was that we see Grandier’s penis being crushed. We don’t. It doesn’t happen; it doesn’t happen. So they were on a late-night BBC talk show and Ken said to Alex Walker, “You’ve said these things in this review and they’re not true.” Alex wasn’t having any of it. So Ken lost his temper and he got up and he smacked Alex Walker over the head with his own review of the film and walked off. This was then a kind of a subject of great, great scandal—of course it was. But the thing that outraged him wasn’t that Alex Walker didn’t like the film; it’s that he said things about it that weren’t true.

Sure. Of course.

And so there are things that are objectively true, right? Who directed the film? Who wrote the film? How did the film get made? Then there are things which are objectively true about placing it within the context and the industry of other versions—is it a remake? Is it a novel adaptation? Where does it sit? There are other things which are objectively true about it, which is: it is this long, or it is this long, it was cut, or it wasn’t. These are objective, actual truths. Beyond that, how you respond to it is nothing but personal. And I find it very… the older I get—and I am very old—the more I think that the only way of being honest about it is to be honest about how personal it is.

I agree.

There was always something that was very difficult about writing for the Monthly Film Bulletin—that they said, “You need to write objectively.” And I tried really hard, but it was like: it was a lie. Me writing objectively was me trying to pretend that something that I thought was objectively true—it’s not objectively true, it’s subjectively true. This is how I respond to the film. And that is what all film criticism is. That’s why opinions differ about things, because everything is subjective. There are things that are objectively, factually correct, true, and then there are things which are your opinions. And the only way you can do that honestly is to be honest about how personal they are, because films are a very personal thing.

One of the reasons that film censorship is quite complicated is because it works on a principle that you can predict how people react to material, broadly speaking, and you can’t. People react strangely to different things, particularly to a sin, to a medium as kind of as vibrant as cinema. This is a very long way of saying that in the end, for me, it’s all personal. It’s all to do with: I attach my affections to films that touch me in a certain way, and I hope that I describe them in a way that makes that make sense, even if you don’t agree with a single word of it. So you can go, “Okay, well, Kermode likes it. But then, of course Kermode likes it.” And even when that comes down to “Kermode,” I said, “Well, of course he likes it, because he likes Ken Russell.” That in itself is a valid criticism, because yes: I do like Ken Russell, and if you understand that I like Ken Russell, that is partly an explanation of why it is that I like the film, because I like the artistic swing, I like the… I like the intent.

And some films are made with more of what I would consider to be valid intent, and some films, there’s no part of me that thinks that when Michael Bay was making the Transformers movies, that he was inspired by a desire to tell those stories in the best possible, life-changing way. I don’t know, because I never met the guy.

Sure.

But when I look at them, they just look like bank balances. They just look like a bunch of numbers.

Mark Kermode and Lisi Tribble at the 64th New York Film Festival. Photo by Sean DiSerio.

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a perfectly valid way of summarizing what’s a very difficult concept that seems like it’s always swimming around. As a way of closing the circle on this—this dream has been fulfilled, and it’s been fulfilled in a way that I think is beyond anybody’s, like I said, six months ago I wouldn’t have thought I’d be sitting there watching a 35mm print to this in its version. With that in mind, what, if anything, is second on the list of “White Whale, I want to see it.”

Well, I don’t know.

I also understand if there’s a hundred things tied for second place.

There almost isn’t. It’s partly an age thing. It’s partly what you refer to as my “white whales” have sailed. I saw The Exorcist and The Devils together on a late-night double bill in 1979. I saw them both on the same evening, right? That is probably the formative experience of my cinema-going life: those two films, one after the other. And then I have obsessed about those two films henceforth. Those two films now exist in the versions—as you said, The Exorcist exists in two versions. One of them is different to the other one. The Devils now exists in the version that it should have existed in. There isn’t anything else that’s burning up, and also because there isn’t anything else that has obsessed me that much over the years. [Note: after our interview, Mark would note that his white whale would be a remastered director’s cut of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist III.]

So I’m kind of probably done. I mean, I’m 63. I’m not going to discover another thing now that I’ve got to, that I’m going to be obsessed about for 30 years. So no: I’m probably, in terms of those things, I’m done, and that’s fine. I’m just very, very pleased that this came about and we got to see it. My only regret is I wish Ken had been here to see it, and I do, but I do think that when the film is projected in an auditorium with an audience, he sort of is, sure. And I do believe that. I do think that there is something transcendent about that experience. But I wish he’d been there; I wish he’d been able to be there so that we could all go, “See?”

I do. I’ve seen this film, I want to spend more time with the films of Ken Russell, which I haven’t spent as much time with as, admittedly, I should. And so it’s like that saying: You die twice—the first time is your body, the second time is the last time somebody says your name.

Oh, I didn’t know that. Wow.

Yeah, that’s an old saying. And how many times is Ken Russell’s name being said today and tomorrow night?

Well, I do think it’s the start of something. I do genuinely think it’s the start of something. I think it’s like this is the birth of The Devils, and if it leads people back to the back catalog—I mean, there’s so much to discover. There is so many great films in there. And there are films that you’ll love, and films that you’ll hate, and films that you’ll be baffled by, and films that you’ll be dazzled by, and films that you will come out afterwards and go to the pub and have really heated discussions about what was going on.

I mean, I love Altered States. I absolutely love Altered States. The first time I saw Altered States was in the Empire Leicester Square in the West End of London, and I absolutely love every minute of it. And then I read some reviews of it, like, “Did we see the same film?” No. It was just, like, I couldn’t—I couldn’t quite understand, and then as I said, everything is personal, everything is. You like Altered States? It’s a great film. The human spirit, the whole thing about the tangible encounter and “I’m going to find the fucker.” Ken and Lisi once did this thing which—they had lines from Ken’s film on ticker tape, and they would give them to people as a gift, and they gave me “And I’m going to find the fucker.”

And in a way, you have found the fucker.

And, well, I have found the fucker—yeah.

Uncut and restored, The Devils opens in theaters on Friday, October 16.

Looking for what to see in theaters? Our feature, updated weekly, highlights our top recommendations for films currently in theaters, from new releases to restorations receiving a proper theatrical run.

While we already provide extensive monthly new-release recommendations and weekly streaming recommendations, as distributors’ roll-outs can vary, this is a one-stop list to share the essential films that may be on a screen near you.

American Doctor (Poh Si Teng)

Poh Si Teng’s American Doctor is a harrowing, heartbreaking portrait of Palestinian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian doctors who are risking their lives to tend to the overwhelming victims of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and speak the truth in any way they can. Dan Mecca said in his Sundance review, “When will this end? When will this bloodshed stop? And when will the United States of America stop supporting it? Filmmaker Poh Si Teng offers a clear-eyed, unrelenting look at the genocide in Gaza with her documentary American Doctor. It follows three doctors––Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, Dr. Thaer Ahmad, and Dr. Mark Perlmutter––that are consistently trying to save lives in the Gaza Strip. On some trips they are approved to enter. On others they are denied for specious reasons. Dr. Perlmutter is Jewish, Dr. Sidhwa is Zoroastrian, and Dr. Ahmad is Palestinian. Their mission is the mission of all medical professionals: to heal everyone they can.”

La Bola Negra (Los Javis)

If 19th- and 20th-century storytelling was defined by grandiose literature, the 21st is all about cinema. We read less and watch more; consequently, films have become a substitute for sweeping stories that weave various timelines and protagonists. The latest in such regard is Cannes revelation La Bola Negra (aka The Black Ball), a truly ambitious project—inspired by historical truth while remaining a fictional, highly personal undertaking. – Jan T. (full review)

Chronovisor (Kevin Walker and Jack Auen)

In a year of remarkable debuts, one of the most formally astounding comes with Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s unclassifiable, riveting detective-meet-academia tale, Chronovisor. As Leonardo Goi said in our Rotterdam review, “Ostensibly set in the present, Chronovisor keeps jamming your temporal bearings. Save for the occasional smartphone, the ‘action,’ such as it is, unfolds in a world frozen in time (when Béatrice tries to contact one of Ernetti’s surviving relatives, it isn’t an email she sends but a typed letter). The focus gradually moves from the academic-turned-detective toward the media she consults: we hear recordings of a lecture Ernetti gave about his creation, watch old TV footage concerning the man and others who sought to communicate with the dead, but mostly we read. Chronovisor is so enamored with the written word that close-ups of books and articles comprise most of its runtime—with English translations of their various languages dished out not as subtitles but placed directly over the original text on the page. There’s nothing precious about the choice: Auen and Walker want you to read along with Béatrice, and what’s so fascinating about their film is the way it tries to combine two different art forms (literature and cinema) and different actions (reading and watching) all while adjusting its pace to the time needed to perform both.”

Fjord (Cristian Mungiu)

As with R.M.N., Mungiu is in top-shelf operation. Fjord is a triumphant film that tugs at the spiritual and soulful in all of us, regardless of nation, creed, faith, or the rejection of all three. What the court will rule in both cases, and whether or not the Gheorghius will get back their kids, pulses with a pregnant tension as the nearly two-and-a-half-hour film proceeds in what seems 30 minutes. And its end will have you falling off the edge of your seat. – Luke H. (full review)

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! (Josef Kubota Wladyka)

One of the breakouts of the Sundance Film Festival this year, where it picked up the U.S. Dramatic Directing award, Josef Kubota Wladyka’s stylish and moving Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! is coming this fall. Blake Simons said in his review, “In dance, you have to lead with confidence. Your partner looks to you for guidance, and they require you to look back at them responsively, to move instinctually without faltering. There’s need for surefootedness, consistency, and impeccable timing. Luckily for us, Josef Kubota Wladyka’s fun and deceptively frothy third feature Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! has all of these qualities in spades.”

The History of Concrete (John Wilson)

Like a movie tie-in, John Wilson’s debut documentary feature, The History of Concrete, picks up immediately where his HBO series How To with John Wilson left off after three seasons. An elevated public profile does not lead to the next bigger, better project. Instead it’s illustrated via Wilson stumbling upon an empty bag of weed featuring an unauthorized branding of his likeness. The full-sized crew afforded by his show now absent, Wilson is forced back to his roots, filming the day-to-day scenes of New York City life solo. – Caleb H. (full review)

If They Go Will They Miss Me (Walter Thompson-Hernández)

Finding poetic beauty in the quotidian, Walter Thompson-Hernández’s If I Go Will They Miss Me centers on coming of age in housing projects of southern Los Angeles. It’s a way of life often depicted with a grittiness that favors do-or-die intensity, yet this emerging director of great promise takes an opposite approach. One where dreams of flight are always on the mind as the planes coming in and out of nearby LAX are constantly passing above. Greek gods, as studied in school, give purpose to a higher calling. An affection and adoration for and from its ensemble (many non-professionals, in this case) form a portrait of a living, loving community that rises above hardship. Just as his characters draw grand personal inspiration, Thompson-Hernández is greatly indebted to a variety of renowned directors, including Barry Jenkins, RaMell Ross, Charles Burnett, and Spike Lee, with the end result a film greater than the sum of its recognizable influences. – Jordan R. (full review)

My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile (Julia Loktev)

With My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow winning the 2025 Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award, the most-anticipated sequel of the year may be Julia Loktev’s My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile, which expands its scope by tracking the journalists who were forced out of Russia and now continue their work across the globe. As Savina Petkova said in our Critic’s Pick review out of Venice, “As Julia Loktev follows her protagonists in exile to Turkey, Georgia, Latvia, the Czech Republic, Poland, and the United States, what in any other film could be a chronicle of homes and places becomes a cartography of grief and displacement. Exile tastes as bitter as the collective responsibility of its protagonists, whose acute sense of accountability (‘we let this happen’ are words uttered by several people) clashes with the ambivalence of being Russian today. Still, the strength of their convictions is the driving force behind My Undesirable Friends, the urge to never forget that history is made here and now.”

NAZA (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor)

In a sobering wake-up call to anyone somehow not paying attention to the genocide Israel is enacting, as well as the most essential documentary of the year, No Other Land directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have returned with NAZA. Luke Hicks said in his review, “Very, very few films, no matter how great or important, are actually urgent. You’ll get around to it eventually; it’ll be stuck in time waiting for you. But NAZA is urgent, an essential film, a living document in conversation with the most pressing issue in the world right now. And it’s the new foremost authority on what’s happening on a granular, behind-the-scenes level in Israel’s crusade against Gaza. It’s much harder to question or deny a genocide that’s happening when the people perpetrating it in real time call it genocide themselves.”

Once Upon a Time in Harlem (William and David Greaves)

Picture this: it’s an overcast day in August 1972. You’re at a cocktail party at Duke Ellington’s townhouse in Harlem. As you awkwardly hold your glass of punch, you’re drowned in cacophonous conversation about art, politics, and society during one of the most vibrant intellectual and creative movements of the modern era. This is the experience of William and David Greaves’ Once Upon a Time in Harlem, an immersive and masterfully rendered documentary that presents a living, breathing oral history of the Harlem Renaissance. Watching it feels like unearthing treasure. – Kent M. W. (full review)

Primetime (Lance Oppenheim)

Robert Pattinson was born to play Chris Hansen. In the opening shot of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime—the documentary savant’s first foray into fiction, this one based on a true story—we immediately see the popular To Catch a Predator host as the menace Oppenheim and first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh want us to understand him as. He’s cast in a devilish red light, swallowed by shadow, displayed through an eerie mini-DV grain, and reciting the lines “I will undress you and you will undress me” over and over in Hansen’s trademark brassy, rehearsed, does-he-really-sound-like-that (yes, he does) tone. The chilling music of the haunted fairytale score glitches in and out while children’s-show chimes ring ominously.  – Luke H. (full review)

Resident Evil (Zach Cregger)

Resident Evil, as a game series, has always borrowed heavily from cinema, whether it be the fixed angles and Kiyoshi Kurosawa inspirations of the first title to the Texas Chainsaw riffs in the 7th. It’s less about the zombies, more the feeling of powerlessness and weird puzzles. Zach Cregger understands this on a deep level. His follow-up to Weapons may not be a pitch-perfect adaptation of the long-running lore, but it perfectly captures the spirit of Resident Evil as a whole, not to mention what it’s like to play it. The perfect title might actually have been Biohazard. – Devan S. (full review)

The Scout (Paula González-Nasser)

Premiering at last year’s Tribeca Festival to much acclaim, Paula González-Nasser’s debut The Scout follows a day in the life of an NYC location scout. Michael Frank said in his Tribeca review, “González-Nasser invites an openness from these characters, each given one scene with Sofia, to banter with her, make her uncomfortable, or some combination of the two. And the young location scout just takes it all in stride, as though she’s been in these situations countless times, as each apartment is a part of her job she doesn’t love, but also doesn’t mind. She might even relish it on one or two occasions, the opportunity to sit on someone’s couch and hear their story or to find a new hack to delete her mountain of parking tickets.”

The Weight (Padraic McKinley)

Gold is such an apt metaphor for greed. It’s shiny, it’s heavy, it’s superficial, and it’s obtained through someone’s hard labor. That labor is carried on the backs of the downtrodden and desperate while its benefactors maintain a comfortable distance. Gold prices are currently at an all-time high, a testament to the timelessness of its corrupting allure, while life isn’t getting any easier for those on the bottom of the economic totem pole. Every day, we see news stories about more people struggling to make ends meet or afford healthcare. It’s a devastating sign of the times which director Padraic McKinley taps into in his debut feature, The Weight. – Kent M. W. (full review)

You Can See Everything (Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim; Oct. 16)

Capping off an astounding season for documentaries, another one that will go down in the annals of non-fiction history is Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s jaw-dropping, enigmatic character(s) study You Can See Everything. What begins as a stranger-than-fiction scenario in which a small crew, including the directors, were invited to the home of Elizabeth Holmes mere weeks before she began her prison sentence evolves into a thoroughly riveting study of the thin line between fact and fiction, public versus private personas, and perverse family dynamics hitherto never quite captured on screen before. Read Nick Newman’s review.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Bassam Tariq)

Latif (Mahershala Ali) is a righteous man. A religious man. He sees himself in a holy war to cleanse the world of his people’s enemies by picking up where the law ends. Those who know about his work justifiably condemn it, whether that be his Imam (Giancarlo Esposito’s Abdul Malik) or his wife. They don’t, however, condemn him. Because they understand his struggle. They know his pain. Why add to it? So, they grant him mercy instead. They accept him and hope he will one day find his way back. – Jared M. (full review)

More Films Now Playing in Theaters

• Atonement
• Digger
• Hope
• The Incomer
• Misty Green
• Sense and Sensibility
• Take Me Home

Read all reviews here. For our NYC-specific repertory round-ups, including many films that will tour the country, bookmark NYC Weekend Watch.