The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Nov 24, 2015 — Film scholar David Bordwell has written a terrific new piece for his blog about the incredible influence and evolution of Agnès Varda’s six-decade-long filmmaking career. “Varda is now regarded as a living treasure of world cinema,” Bordwell writes. “Whatever she...
Sneak Peeks
Jun 14, 2012 — Few movies feel as cold-blooded as Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave, a fact attributable as much to its striking and sinister visual approach as its bleak downward spiral of a plot and amoral main characters. In this clip from an interview...
Jun 28, 2011 — Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro is the funniest book ever written in, and about, the French language. When it came out in 1959, it “made the whole of France laugh,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who helped Louis Malle adapt it to...
Mar 15, 2011 — The site of Louis Malle’s film Au revoir les enfants was the Petit-Collège d’Avon, a residential prep school located on the grounds of the Carmelite monastery abutting the park of the fabled French palace of Fontainebleau. Malle attended this school...
Aug 14, 2006 — It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze,...
Essays
Apr 26, 1999 — At some point in their lives, probably every sleepless person has switched on the TV in the wee hours of a weekend morning and chanced upon a fishing show. Invariably, a beefy, half-forgotten retired athlete shares a boat with some...
Feb 12, 2013 — The Dardenne brothers return to the streets of Seraing for a typically humane and suspenseful story of personal redemption.
Nov 28, 2016 — PerformancesAny paean to noir seductress nonpareil Gloria Grahame—mine included—can’t hope to surpass this encomium from Boyd McDonald, one of her most ardent and articulate devotees. Saluting Grahame’s performance in In a Lonely Place (1950) in his essential 1985 compendium, Cruising...
Jun 13, 2012 — Tasteful British cinema got a refreshing dose of amorality with Danny Boyle’s stylish and violent tale of greed and paranoia.
Apr 22, 2026 — “The wig has a name. The wig’s name is Pam.”I was not even a little surprised to hear that Dallas-born filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary had given a name to the bouncy brown bob she wears in her film The Giverny Document...