The Criterion Collection

The following account of a visit to the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls set is excerpted from an issue of the University of California, Los Angeles, newspaper. Read more »

Today, we’re celebrating iconic Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni on what would have been his 104th birthday. A pioneering force in European cinema in the sixties, Antonioni won international acclaim for his breathtaking portraits of . . . 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 »

In this essay, first published in Grand Street in 1994, Dr. Strangelove coscreenwriter Terry Southern offers a lively behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production. Read more »

School’s out for summer! And what better way to mark this first day of the season than by revisiting Richard Linklater’s classic 1993 teen comedy Dazed and Confused. Set in suburban Texas in 1976 amid a haze of bong smoke and a sea of . . . Read more »

For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders . . . Read more »

This month marked the long-awaited release of The Apu Trilogy on DVD and Blu-ray. Now that Satyajit Ray’s dazzling epic is back out in its original glory, take a look back at the painstaking process of rescuing and restoring the films, whose . . . Read more »

The eternal Beatle and mischievous star of A Hard Day’s Night (1964) would have turned seventy-five today. Read more »

To celebrate the French New Wave’s eternal muse Anna Karina on her seventy-fifth birthday, here’s a behind-the-scenes image from her former husband Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie, which gave her one of her greatest roles. Read more »

The cuddliest of the New American Cinema auteurs of the seventies was born on this day in 1929. Hal Ashby’s output from that decade never loses its ability to astonish; bookended by two of the era’s great social-minded comedies, The Landlord . . . Read more »