The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”
Essays
May 13, 2002 — In Barbet Schroeder’s portrait of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, we watch a seemingly amiable, thoroughly pompous despot attempt to transform himself into a figure of heroic proportions.
Essays
Nov 14, 1995 — Tamura (Eiji Funakoshi), the hero of Kon Ichikawa’s drama, may be the loneliest man in the history of the movies—lonelier than the spiritual pilgrims of Bergman, Bresson, and Dreyer.
Essays
Oct 25, 1994 — Kenji Mizoguchi develops his medieval fable about moral freedom and slavery with intuition, cunning, and an overarching sense of tragedy.
Dec 21, 2017 — No one has captured the complexities of forbidden love with more intimacy than Celia Johnson in David Lean’s classic romance.
Essays
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.,...
The Daily
Mar 20, 2026 — We’re reading up on the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Chantal Akerman—and Liza Minnelli has a new memoir.
Sep 16, 2025 — In response to the suffocating conservatism of the eighties, Lizzie Borden crafted a pluralistic vision of a feminist front that neither ignores difference nor lets it stand as an immovable obstacle to political solidarity.
Aug 26, 2025 — Alice Wu’s feature debut is a romantic comedy in which the most compelling relationship is the one between a young queer Chinese American woman and her long-widowed mother.