The Criterion Collection
Essays
Mar 29, 1999 — Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits was the most critically well-received children’s film in nearly two decades—and also the most challenging and rewarding fantasy-adventure movie since Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad, released forty-one years earlier. At the dawn of the 1980s,...
Sneak Peeks
Jan 7, 2016 — View a clip from Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, featuring actor Meiko Kaji in a scene that highlights the film’s dazzlingly choreographed combination of visual beauty and unflinching ferocity.
Jan 6, 2023 — Kazuo Ishiguro is a Nobel Prize–winning novelist, screenwriter, and song lyricist. Born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954, he moved to Britain with his parents when he was five years old. His books, translated into over fifty languages, have earned him...
Short Takes
Aug 22, 2016 — “I’ve never made any secret of the fact that at least 50 percent of my reason for writing can be blamed on Shelagh Delaney,” the singer-songwriter once said. Gathered here are some of his most prominent references to the English...
Apr 8, 2016 — Ten years ago, with the release of his debut film Reprise, a spirited drama about two young aspiring novelists, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier emerged as one of the most interesting new voices in European cinema.
Mar 30, 2016 — More than forty years after legendary documentarian Les Blank began filming singer-songwriter Leon Russell, the brilliant work that emerged from his observations, A Poem Is a Naked Person, is finally available on Blu-ray and DVD. This long-awaited vérité wonder melds...
Dec 9, 2025 — In her Cannes-award-winning narrative feature debut, Mira Nair sees the lives of Indian street children with an unconditionally generous gaze, taking in their world in all its contradictions and complexity.
Dec 18, 2024 — The bulk of this year’s selections comes from a three-decade stretch from the early 1970s to the late ’90s.
Nov 26, 2024 — In this tragicomic road movie about a Bible-selling con man and his precocious young charge, Peter Bogdanovich brings Depression-era America to vivid life without sentimentality or nostalgia.