The Criterion Collection
Danny Peary is the author of Cult Movies and has written film criticism for such publications as Focus on Film, the Velvet Light Trap, and Newsday.
Amy Taubin wrote regularly about movies for the Village Voice for fifteen years and for Artforum and Film Comment even longer. She lives and still writes a lot in New York City.
Peter Cowie has been a specialist in Swedish cinema since the 1960s and has provided commentaries for numerous films in the Criterion Collection. His biography of Ingmar Bergman will appear in late 2023.
Nov 18, 2025 — Though the first two decades of the Iranian filmmaker’s career have long been underappreciated, this fertile period yielded philosophical and restlessly innovative works that reinvigorated both documentary and narrative-fiction cinema.
Production Notes
Apr 22, 2022 — Over my forty-plus years at Janus and Criterion, few films have meant more to me than For All Mankind, because of my lifelong passion for space travel. I remember being a second-semester freshman and registering for Astronomy 101. It was...
Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...
Features
Mar 11, 2020 — One Scene With his Oscar-nominated debut feature, Beasts of the Southern Wild, director Benh Zeitlin brought to the screen a vision of Louisiana that combined the unique flavors and textures of his adopted home state with the magical twists and...
Criterion Designs
Feb 26, 2020 — For the Blu-ray edition of Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman, we wanted to make something that quite literally stood out. As an homage to the pioneering craftsman Zeman—whose wondrous work is represented in our newly released set by Journey...
Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...
Features
Jan 4, 2019 — More than thirty years ago, a friend of Janus Films—the producer of I Was a Teenage Zombie—who knew of my interest in space exploration called me to say he had seen excerpts of a really cool film at DuArt, a lab...