The Criterion Collection
Mar 29, 2017 — Film journalist Mark Harris stopped by Criterion to chat about the growing pains that five Hollywood filmmakers experienced during World War II.
Essays
Jan 20, 2015 — Here he is: the real, unreal Guy Maddin, in his phantasmagorical, polymathic stew of sex, memory, and dreams.
Essays
May 26, 2026 — Of all the performing arts, stand-up comedy may be the most ephemeral, even more so if the humor is considered dangerous or taboo. Stand-up relies on the charged dynamic between a comedian and an audience, with both sides often bringing...
Jul 30, 2015 — It is now thirty years since the release of Stephen Frears’s film, which was both a product of and a response to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain and depicted the lives of Pakistani immigrants with wit and...
Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...
Essays
Sep 24, 2024 — A sceenwriter, novelist, and longtime friend of director Todd Solondz recalls the admiration he felt upon first seeing this audacious ensemble drama, which offers an unflinching, compassionate look at the pain and abjection of being human.
Feb 23, 2017 — Pedro Almodóvar’s Oscar-nominated breakthrough revels in the complexities of the female psyche.
Jul 11, 2019 — When we think of Ingrid Bergman, we may immediately call up images of her “you deserve this!” smile, or the indecision on her face in Casablanca (1942). There is a rare kind of suspense in watching Bergman’s face in flux...
Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...
Jan 25, 2022 — By repeatedly staging the death of the filmmaker’s father with tragicomic flair, Kirsten Johnson’s hybrid documentary grapples with the realities of dementia and finds grace.