The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 17, 2025 — Mitchell Leisen’s marvelously chic and brilliantly constructed screwball classic revolves around a heroine who flounders through a succession of complications but always manages to come out ahead.
Jan 31, 2023 — In this shape-shifting exploration of creativity, couplehood, and artistic influence, Mia Hansen-Løve offers a glimpse at the existential heavy lift required by her deceptively simple autofictions.
Feb 15, 2022 — Playful irreverence gives way to tragedy and transcendence in Leo McCarey’s 1939 masterwork, one of the defining romances of the Hollywood studio era.
The Daily
Mar 29, 2021 — Filmmakers, programmers, and critics remember a man who “embodied the spirit of cinema as robustly as anyone ever has.”
Essays
Nov 19, 2019 — In 1989, film critic Raphaël Bassan coined the term cinéma du look. Describing a tendency in French cinema that had begun in the early eighties and would continue into the nineties, Bassan identified commonalities in the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix,...
Jul 18, 2019 — With its picturesque Provençal village, florid theatrical dialogue, and cast of familiar southern-French actors, dominated by the formidable Raimu, The Baker’s Wife is classic Marcel Pagnol territory. In 1938, when the film was released, the feted author and playwright was...
May 8, 2019 — Songbook “The very first time I saw a picture of [Charles Starkweather], I knew I was looking at the future. His eyes were a double zero. There was just nothing there. He was like an outrider of what America might...
Criterion Designs
Jan 7, 2019 — The artist behind our new cover for Hitchcock’s spy-noir masterwork remembers falling in love with the film as a child and walks through the process of illustrating one of its most iconic scenes.
Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.
On the Channel
Jul 27, 2018 — “We make each other alive; it doesn’t make a difference if it hurts,” Bergman once wrote to Ullmann—and that emotional intensity gave fuel to their extraordinary forty-year collaboration.