The Criterion Collection
Features
Aug 6, 2019 — Once, in 1977, Werner Herzog read a news item about a volcano that was supposed to erupt in Guadeloupe and one man living there who refused to evacuate with the rest of the island’s population. Herzog being Herzog, he immediately...
Essays
Dec 21, 2017 — The result of a tumultuous production, Orson Welles’s eccentric take on Othello infuses the play with a convulsive rhythm and disorienting sense of abstraction.
Jun 20, 2017 — At the dawn of sound cinema, French theater titan Marcel Pagnol immortalized his epic vision of his native Provence in three exquisite humanist dramas.
May 31, 2017 — New Taiwan Cinema master Edward Yang’s sophomore feature explores the conflict between tradition and modernity reflected in a relationship on the rocks.
Jul 21, 2016 — Interweaving wartime footage with haunting images of abandoned concentration camps, Alain Resnais’s breakthrough was one of the first films to confront the ravages of the Holocaust.
Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.
Feb 7, 2011 — Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable...
Essays
Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.
Jul 23, 2007 — It’s hard to think of an artist who better exemplifies the obscuring ebb and flow of film history than Raymond Bernard.
Sep 18, 1995 — The global problem of domestic violence destroys families and, in a broader context, locks entire societies into a pathology of pain, distrust, and self-hate. When the basic building blocks of any society—the bonds between mother, father, children—are so grossly violated,...