The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 12, 2019 — In a stark, forbidding prison, a nun ascends a staircase, framed by vertical bars, and walks down a corridor, unlocking cell doors. Women start coming out; two of them quarrel. Smoking on her bunk, one inmate sighs when told she...
Interviews
Jan 9, 2019 — There’s a certain tall-tale quality to Sandi Tan’s life. When the California-based filmmaker was growing up in Singapore in the 1980s and ’90s, movies were a powerful way of experiencing the world beyond her small native country, a place she...
Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.
In Theaters
Feb 1, 2017 — The latest release from Janus Films, Polish director Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s debut feature, The Lure, opens today at New York’s IFC Center. In this spectacular horror-musical hybrid, two carnivorous mermaid sisters are enticed into a lurid life on land in a...
Oct 13, 2016 — From its diffusely structured narrative to its innovative cinematography, this radical western is a showcase for Robert Altman’s iconoclastic style.
Short Takes
May 24, 2016 — “I always thought of musicians as being the saints of our time,” says documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker in a recent interview for the New York Times on the subject of his 1967 vérité portrait of Bob Dylan Dont Look...
Essays
Apr 19, 2016 — In Whit Stillman’s second feature, cousins Fred and Ted Boynton (Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols) navigate an occasionally hostile culture and their own late transitions to adulthood.
Short Takes
Jan 20, 2016 — Earlier this month, we lost Vilmos Zsigmond, the venerated Hungarian cinematographer. Not only was he one of the greatest directors of photography in the world—known for his influential work with Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, and Brian De Palma, among others—Zsigmond...
Dec 29, 2015 — Kitchen Conversations“I almost have the impression that films come by themselves and you’re like a slave to them—one of them decides to go for it, and you run after it,” said director Deniz Gamze Ergüven when she and her eight-month-old...
Sneak Peeks
Mar 13, 2014 — David Gordon Green’s George Washington makes cinematic poetry out of the tricky art of voice-over narration. In this excerpt from our special edition’s commentary track, writer-director Green and actor Paul Schneider discuss the earthy beauty that fourteen-year-old Candace Evanofski brings...