The Criterion Collection
Essays
Mar 10, 2003 — Vilgot Sjöman’s cultural-sexual sensation sparked much critical and popular mayhem, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.
Essays
Feb 11, 2002 — The phenomenon of old age wherein childhood memories return with ever-increasing clarity while great stretches of the prime of life vanish into obscurity is the nub of Ingmar Bergman’s drama.
Essays
Oct 12, 1987 — For more than forty years, The Seventh Seal has been a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged. It launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor,...
Tom Gunning is Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press, 1991) and The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and...
Jul 25, 2023 — In his five collaborations with actor Randolph Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown, Boetticher presents an unsentimental vision of honor-bound men competing and banding together in a desolate landscape ruled by chance.
Jul 25, 2016 — In his masterful reimagining of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, Terrence Malick meditates on the nature of beauty and America’s path from innocence to experience.
Feb 18, 2016 — The Kid marked Charlie Chaplin’s wholehearted embrace of sentiment, which he intertwined with the slapstick he was known for to enrich his Tramp character and carry the narrative of feature-length directorial debut.
Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.
Essays
May 17, 2004 — Banned by the Third Reich before it was even released, Fritz Lang’s denunciation of Nazi Germany is a compellingly contemporary image of terrorism in an age of universal conspiracy and advanced technology.
The Daily
Jan 6, 2023 — We’re catching up with a conversation with Tom Gunning, an essay on the nuclear threat, and appreciations of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Norma Shearer.