The Criterion Collection
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Mar 2, 2018 — “This was a singular experience,” writes novelist Walter Mosley, who’s revisited Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967) and turns in a powerful piece in the Hollywood Reporter. On the one hand, the “belief in the North as...
Jul 2, 2026 — I first met Courtney Love in 1994. I was twelve years old, and I felt ugly and confused pretty much all the time. I was slouching through the locker bay at Calle Mayor Middle School in Torrance, California, when I...
May 28, 2019 — Nadine Labaki’s jury has selected an eclectic range of award winners from this year’s program.
May 1, 2017 — Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 Rumble Fish captures rebellious youth in all its existential angst, following gang leader Rusty-James (Matt Dillon) as he navigates troubled relationships with his near-mythical older brother (Mickey Rourke), his on-and-off girlfriend (Diane Lane), and his drunkard...
Essays
Jun 16, 2026 — The debut in 1998 of Lisa Cholodenko’s first feature film, High Art, was a triumph. The intense mastery of its form and the freshness of its narrative created waves of excitement—from the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo...
Essays
Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...
Essays
May 12, 2026 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. The foundational myth of the American dream puts forth...
Jul 20, 2022 — A brutal critique of the American dream, Carl Franklin’s 1995 thriller explicitly confronts the racialized implications of classic film noir.
Jan 12, 2021 — In the course of selling or promoting a film, a director will invariably be asked, “What’s this movie really about?” The desired answer is usually predetermined—marketers want a concise, two-sentence hook; reporters want a sound bite; critics want a thesis...
Essays
Jun 14, 2022 — Ekwa Msangi’s intimate feature debut pushes the conventions of the immigrant family drama.