The Criterion Collection

Adapted from the best-selling novel by Jacqueline Susann, Mark Robson’s 1967 melodrama Valley of the Dolls offers a campy look at the glamour and excess of sixties showbiz. Among its many enduring pleasures is the sensational clothing worn by . . . Read more »

To celebrate the beginning of autumn this week, the BFI has published a list of ten films set during the season, including Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, and Ingmar Bergman’s . . . Read more »

Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton’s legendary partnership began in the mid-thirties at MGM under the supervision of David O. Selznick, but it wasn’t until the 1942 RKO film Cat People that their chemistry produced an original and highly . . . Read more »

This weekend, the Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley, California, will screen Yasujiro Ozu’s 1958 film Equinox Flower as part of a two-month series highlighting his late-career work. With the Japanese master’s trademark empathy and wistfulness, . . . Read more »

An exhilarating blend of noir and splatter-flick tropes, the Coen brothers’ debut feature established their unique brand of cosmic fatalism. Read more »

Cloaked in chiaroscuro and innuendo, this stylistically innovative creature feature leaves its greatest horrors to the imagination. Read more »

If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop. Read more »

Since the beginning of their three-decade creative partnership, Joel and Ethan Coen have developed a meticulous approach to filmmaking. From the tight scripting to the impeccable visual style, each new Coen film is marked by a scrupulous . . . Read more »

Over at The Quietus, director Joe Dante selects his thirteen favorite films, including David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels, and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be. Angelo Badalamenti sits down with Vulture to . . . Read more »

The role of women in Japanese society remained an abiding theme throughout Kenji Mizoguchi’s career. Forever under the thumb of a cruel and patriarchal world, his working-class heroines endure the torments of subjugation while often proving to . . . Read more »

Need some respite from the twenty-four-hour news cycle? Bill Hader and Fred Armisen’s hysterical IFC Channel series Documentary Now! returns with some comedic salve for our weary election-season souls. Read more »

This week, we were proud to release Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1939 film The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, a devastating meditation on the costs of artistic ambition that showcases the director’s luminous visual style at its most sophisticated. In . . . Read more »

This weekend, the Cinematheque at the Cleveland Institute of Art will pay tribute to the late Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami with a screening of his international breakthrough, Taste of Cherry. This haunting meditation on life and death . . . Read more »

Bursting at the seams with vibrant characters, disarming humor, and startling swordplay, Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman represents Japanese action cinema at its crowd-pleasing best. Over the course of twenty-five installments produced between . . . Read more »

Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation. Read more »

Chinchón is not Paris. It’s not Ibiza. It’s not even Grenoble. It’s a sleepy, provincial Spanish town an hour’s bus ride out of Madrid, and not where you would expect to find the great Orson Welles at the mid-1960s height of his European . . . Read more »

It’s hard to imagine the landscape of American cinema today had Charles Burnett’s student thesis film, Killer of Sheep, never received a theatrical release. Made in 1977 on a budget of less than ten thousand dollars, this achingly intimate but . . . Read more »

On his seventy-sixth birthday, we’re celebrating the work of Hollywood enfant terrible Brian De Palma, whose iconoclastic five-decade career has encompassed an astonishing array of genres, including erotic thriller, war drama, and science . . . Read more »

Film Comment’s September/October issue features a brand-new design, a special section on the New York Film Festival, and articles on contemporary film acting, criticism in the age of social media, and Charles Burnett’s newly restored To Sleep . . . Read more »

Just before the premiere of their new film, author Laura Albert and director Jeff Feuerzeig stopped by Criterion for lunch and a visit to our film closet. Read more »

We’re proud to be releasing Kirsten Johnson’s remarkable debut feature, Cameraperson, which opens today at New York’s IFC Center. Weaving together footage from Johnson’s twenty-five-year career as a globetrotting documentary cinematographer, . . . Read more »

This weekend, Mike Leigh’s 1990 comedy Life Is Sweet will screen at the Trylon microcinema in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as part of a monthlong retrospective of the director’s early films. This intimate portrait of working-class life in . . . Read more »

Few political films have remained as incendiary or as relevant as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, which opened in Italy on this day fifty years ago. Shot in the streets of Algiers with a ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy influenced . . . Read more »

Today, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog opens at New York’s IFC Center for its first theatrical run in fifteen years. Originally produced for Polish television, this ten-part meditation on the Ten Commandments centers on the residents of a . . . Read more »

In response to the BBC’s recently published, male-dominated poll of the hundred greatest movies of the twenty-first century, Fusion has shared a list of the best contemporary films directed by women, including the work of Andrea Arnold, . . . Read more »

Balancing epic scale with lyrical intimacy, Orson Welles inflects the spirit of Shakespeare’s history plays with his own zest for cinematic invention. Read more »

Tonight, the Loft Cinema in Tucson, Arizona, will kick off a monthlong Jim Jarmusch retrospective with the director’s 1984 sophomore feature, Stranger Than Paradise. Told in a series of meandering vignettes, this masterful portrait of hipster . . . Read more »

Set in nineteenth-century Macao, Orson Welles’s adaptation of a classic tale by Isak Dinesen is a hypnotic meditation on the pitfalls of storytelling. Read more »