The Criterion Collection
Movie critic Michael Sragow, the author of Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, edited two volumes of James Agee’s prose for the Library of America. His documentary writing and coproducing credits include Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneer Cinematographers...
A longtime critic for the late Village Voice, J. Hoberman is the author of books including a three-volume history of Cold War Hollywood (An Army of Phantoms, The Dream Life, and Make My Day) as well as monographs on Jack...
David Ehrenstein has been writing about film since 1965, for such publications as Film Culture, Film Quarterly, Film Comment, Cahiers du cinéma, and Positif. His books include The Scorsese Picture: The Art and Life of Martin Scorsese and Open Secret:...
Peter Cowie has been a specialist in Swedish cinema since the 1960s and has provided commentaries for numerous films in the Criterion Collection. His biography of Ingmar Bergman will appear in late 2023.
May 26, 2026 — Women’s hands dance over typewriter keys. The percussive racket they make, like the tapping of an unruly chorus line, takes the place of music during the opening credits of The Office Wife (1930), which appear over a montage of female...
Mar 6, 2019 — Performances As Howard Hawks was preparing to make His Girl Friday, his 1940 version of the classic Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, he was determined not to repeat what he felt had been a problem with his earlier comedy Bringing Up...
On the Channel
Jun 22, 2017 — Most film analysis centers on what is visible on-screen, but sometimes a moment can hinge on information that lies beyond the frame. In the latest installment of Observations on Film Art, a Criterion Channel series that explores the ins and...
Mar 3, 2017 — Did You See This? In his latest Cinema ’67 Revisited column for Film Comment, Mark Harris looks back at the rapturous critical reception of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona upon its release, calling the film a monument “to a moment at which...
Feb 17, 2017 — In 1970, legendary filmmaker Roger Corman founded New World Pictures, an independent studio that produced and distributed everything from B-movies and exploitation films to acclaimed foreign art-house fare by Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman. It became a breeding...
Short Takes
Jan 19, 2017 — Ever wonder what, exactly, a “girl Friday” is? Over on his blog, scholar David Bordwell gets to the bottom of this and some other questions about Howard Hawks’s 1940 screwball masterpiece, a film that has beguiled him for almost fifty...