The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.
Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.
Jun 19, 2006 — Decades after its backyard birth, Jack Woods’s DIY horror movie has forged a model of inspiration for succeeding generations of effects artists and low-budget filmmakers.
Apr 17, 2006 — Another movie, another cause célèbre: this mysterious film by Orson Welles has been dismissed as a disaster and hailed as a masterpiece.
Apr 28, 2026 — As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw...
Oct 30, 2025 — Classics of the genre—including Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession and David Cronenberg’s The Fly—explore the gory extremes of corporeal experience.
Oct 26, 2023 — Ever since he began working with the Miami-based film festival and collective Third Horizon in 2016, Jonathan Ali has been finding ways of celebrating Caribbean cinema and how it captures the irreducible complexity of the region and its diaspora. He...
Oct 24, 2023 — A beautiful, intense woman stands in a large, dusky room, lit only by an oil lamp, her eyes wide in concern and something not far from panic, her eyebrows tremulously registering every thought and fear that passes through her mind,...
Jun 20, 2023 — Two young San Francisco residents navigate the potential for romance and their opposing views on race in Barry Jenkins’s moving debut feature.
Jun 14, 2023 — In her deeply empathetic documentaries, the British filmmaker illuminates the lives of ordinary people who have quietly created new identities and possibilities for themselves.