The Criterion Collection
Jul 21, 2016 — Interweaving wartime footage with haunting images of abandoned concentration camps, Alain Resnais’s breakthrough was one of the first films to confront the ravages of the Holocaust.
Essays
Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.
Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.
Sep 22, 2008 — With their rotating casts of sourpuss Finns and their stringent compositions, Aki Kaurismäki’s films would seem the least likely candidates for laughs, yet his black-comic precision has made him one of the most warmly embraced filmmakers on the international art-house...
Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.
Dec 5, 2005 — If there is a skeleton key to François Truffaut’s oeuvre, it is this film, in which all of his assorted gifts and preoccupations are in play and meshed into a uniquely idiosyncratic whole.
Essays
Sep 29, 2003 — Roman Polanski’s maiden feature would define his maverick status once and for all.
The Daily
Apr 28, 2026 — Opening with Jane Fonda’s tribute to Robert Redford, this year’s edition features several world premieres of new restorations.
Jan 22, 2026 — A deft mixture of family epic, romantic melodrama, landscape cinema, and comedy, Burkinabe director Idrissa Ouédraogo’s landmark film balances the universality of its themes with the fierce individuality of its characters.
Mar 25, 2025 — Unfettered by the precepts of bourgeois morality and the nuclear family, the characters in Alan Rudolph’s romantic drama struggle to find happiness as they navigate love’s whims and ambiguities.