The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Nov 1, 2015 — Forty years ago today, we lost Pier Paolo Pasolini—the celebrated Italian filmmaker, actor, poet, novelist, journalist, playwright, painter, and public intellectual. On November 2, 1975, Pasolini was found brutally murdered on a beach in Ostia, Italy, just weeks before the...
Apr 14, 2015 — Before he turned Vienna into a labyrinth of shadows with The Third Man, Carol Reed brought film noir to Belfast for this stylishly fatalistic tale of a man caught up in political violence.
May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...
May 29, 2012 — A watershed film in Bergman’s career, this tale of a woman caught between the past and present is a masterful study in darkness and light.
Essays
Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s landmark film intermingles the sacred and profane, associating libertines with holy music, the avant-garde of the thirties, and neoclassical and biblical references.
Essays
Oct 4, 2011 — No film better illustrates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s challenge to conventional representations, to the social and cultural consensus, than his 1976 masterwork.
Production Notes
Aug 27, 2008 — A few months back, after we announced our upcoming release of Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom, we received a note from a viewer asking us which version of the film we would be releasing, noting that a 2001...
Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.
Aug 25, 2026 — In her second film, Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple captures the anguish and perils of disunity in the labor movement and the corrosion of union power during the Reagan era.