A Life of Her Own

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Jul 24, 2012 — Trained as a musician, Jean Grémillon became one of French cinema’s most lyrical artists. His most beloved films were made during World War II.

May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.

Feb 2, 2011 — This essay first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. It is posted here by permission of the author. Michelangelo said he could sense the figure in the uncut stone; his job was...

Aug 5, 2010 — I work in the editorial department here at Criterion, and I’ve recently taken it on myself to do a little poking around at the office, to find out what my colleagues have going on and share that with visitors to...

Apr 21, 2009 — “Just takes a few months to get to be a hundred. If you’re in the right place at the right time.” I first saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece The Wages of Fear when the restored version was released in the U.S.,...

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.

Jul 21, 2026 — Harry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed. Unlike Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, Stanton’s character hasn’t been discussed, chewed over, anticipated, and foreshadowed for...

Jun 29, 2026 — In the run-up to the country’s 250th birthday, several venues are offering prompts for celebration and reflection.