The Dream

Jul 17, 1995 — Kurosawa made the acquaintance of Desu Uzala thirty years earlier, when he read Vladimir Arseniev’s account of charting the Russian-Manchurian border in the earlier part of this century. There, the Russian soldier and explorer had met Dersu, the Siberian hunter,...

Mar 12, 2021 — Deep Dives I can think of few movies that express the pain of being young better than Hiroshi Teshigahara and Kobo Abe’s Ako (1964). I first happened upon it by chance, lurking among the supplements on the Criterion edition of...

Jan 17, 2014 — Did You See This?• A Hoop Dreams oral history • Martin Scorsese and Wong Kar-wai—two legends chatting • Thelma Schoonmaker goes long. • A comic turn from J. Hoberman • The total Jerry Lewis • A lost Fassbinder–Schlöndorff collaboration resurfaces....

Nov 30, 2009 — The following essay was originally written for Criterion’s website in 2005, on the occasion of the DVD release of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. We have posted it here to coincide with BFI Southbank’s ongoing Hein Heckroth exhibition...

Jan 4, 2007 — As we get back from vacation, the e-mail boxes are full. Kim, several of the other producers, and I have been doing our best to get to it all, but it’s beginning to pile up. We’ve been pretty good about...

Feb 18, 2026 — Among this month’s highlights are a celebration of VHS and how it revolutionized film culture, a spotlight on the Romanian New Wave, and a retrospective of pioneering queer filmmaker Monika Treut.

May 23, 2025 — We’re in the mood for Wong Kar Wai, Kira Muratova, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Alan Rudolph, and Dag Johan Haugerud.

Jan 3, 2024 — The new year will bring us new work from Leos Carax, Bong Joon Ho, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Leigh, David Cronenberg, Celine Song . . .

Jun 27, 2017 — On what would have been his seventy-sixth birthday, we look back at the incandescent, richly cinematic reveries of one of the most acclaimed Polish filmmakers of his generation.

Jun 22, 2016 — In honor of the semicentennial anniversary of Kartemquin Films, the influential documentarian discusses his groundbreaking, Kartemquin-produced 1994 film Hoop Dreams, what his work with the company has meant for him, and how Kartemquin has grown over the past fifty years.