The Criterion Collection
Feb 17, 2023 — Born and raised far from the centers of power in the movie industry, writer-director Glen Pitre began his career in the 1980s as a DIY filmmaker, showing his homemade productions to audiences in his native Louisiana. But when a powerful...
Dec 1, 2022 — During the production of our release of Amores perros in 2020, the film’s writer-director, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, gave us a remarkable window into his creative process, showing us some of the dozens of note cards he’d used in planning scenes...
Essays
Jul 12, 2022 — In David Lean’s Venice-set romance, a fleeting love affair prompts a woman’s self-exploration.
Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...
Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films Come on now, honey sugarYou know your baby loveYou know just the other dayI was gonna take you to go see a movieSweet Sweetback . . . Stevie Wonder, “Sweet Little Girl,” 1972 We went...
Sep 23, 2021 — Gina Prince-Bythewood’s iconic debut portrays Black love without forcing its heroine to compromise herself and her ambitions.
Features
Sep 22, 2021 — Writer-director John Huston blasted the fusty pieties that pervaded big-studio filmmaking in the post-Code era, whether as the progenitor of film noir with The Maltese Falcon (1941) or the brainy daredevil who threaded critiques of frontier capitalism, gold lust, and...
Essays
Jul 20, 2021 — Dismissed as gossip-column fodder in its time, Jacques Deray’s cooly enigmatic villa thriller is an exploration of masculine vanity and feminine disillusion.
Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...
May 11, 2021 — When Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out, in the summer of 1982, I was almost exactly the same age as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy Hamilton, getting ready to start my sophomore year in high school. Like Stacy’s world-weary older...