Piece by Piece

Feb 22, 2018 — Luis Buñuel was born on this day, February 22, in 1900. “By 1961, Buñuel was born again, so to speak,” writes Jeremy Carr, having sketched the career from Un chien andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930) through the years in...

Oct 28, 2017 — New York. “It’s an idea so good,” writes Farran Smith Nehme in the Village Voice, “you can’t believe no one did it before: a book about the deep and abiding friendship between Henry Fonda and James Stewart, true legends of...

Oct 2, 2017 — Vulture has polled more than forty working screenwriters—their names and credits are listed—to come up with an annotated list of the “100 Best Screenwriters of All Time.” David Edelstein’s written the entry on the legend who’s landed at the top,...

Nov 11, 2016 — This week’s Friday Night Double Feature on the Criterion Channel demonstrates how much suspense a superb director can wring from an intriguing premise without resorting to yelling “boo!” or splashing gore.

Nov 24, 2015 — In Dont Look Back, legendary documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker employs his revolutionary new camera and Direct Cinema style to capture the multiple essences and contradictions of a young Bob Dylan making his way across England in 1965.

Nov 13, 2014 — Michael Lennick, visual effects supervisor, writer, filmmaker, self described sci-fi geek, and friend of the Criterion Collection, died last week in Toronto. Early in his career, Michael created special video effects for David Cronenberg’s films Videodrome and The Dead Zone....

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s ingenious tale of Viennese cafe society conveys both the transience of individual passions and the durability of passion itself as a motivating force in human behavior.

Apr 28, 2008 — Adapted from Holling C. Holling’s classic, Bill Mason’s paean to nature follows the travels of a tiny, wooden canoe from a cabin in the Nipigon woods of west Ontario to the expanses of the Atlantic Ocean.

Feb 19, 2007 — A powerful document of anti-Nazi propaganda, Powell and Pressburger’s war drama consolidated their partnership and showed a way forward for British cinema.

Apr 19, 1994 — Rivaled only by Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst as Germany’s greatest director of the silent age, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a tireless formal innovator exhilaratingly difficult to pin down. If his 1922 horror epic Nosferatu represented an apex of...