The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 18, 2011 — An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King; a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady; a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, a Musket...
Mar 15, 2011 — The site of Louis Malle’s film Au revoir les enfants was the Petit-Collège d’Avon, a residential prep school located on the grounds of the Carmelite monastery abutting the park of the fabled French palace of Fontainebleau. Malle attended this school...
Mar 31, 2026 — Claude Lelouch’s Palme d’Or–winning breakout hit combines elements of a classic Hollywood love story with dynamic photography, an edgy editing style, and a naturalistic sense of character and location.
Aug 27, 2024 — A brilliant satire, inspired by a 1973 PBS documentary series that gave rise to the reality-television genre, Albert Brooks’s first feature film examines the ethical dilemmas of combining cheap entertainment and sociological experiment.
Mar 21, 2016 — Edward Yang’s masterful 1991 adolescent epic telegraphs the tensions and turbulence of 1960s Taiwan, when youth pop culture and teen street gangs became a major societal force.
Feb 19, 2026 — Though in many ways the quintessential company man, the director brought an intimate understanding of the margins of American society to the films he made for Warner Bros. in the 1930s.
Sep 16, 2025 — A portrait of a new generation of feminist consciousness in the New York art world, Lizzie Borden’s first film project spikes with a persistent friction between the filmmaker and her documentary subjects.
Aug 28, 2025 — Made for public television, this moving vérité documentary about three terminally ill cancer patients is one of the purest expressions of the director’s career-long preoccupation with human fragility.
Jun 26, 2025 — One of the defining independent films of its era, François Girard’s provocatively splintered portrait of the great pianist finds playful ways of toying with the cultural mythologization of its subject.