The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 5, 2017 — Kirsten Johnson interrogates the thorny ethics of nonfiction filmmaking in her intriguingly elliptical blend of essay, travelogue, and memoir.
Jul 13, 2016 — The Oscar-nominated documentarian discusses Resnais’s film—made in 1955, ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps—which was one of the first to confront the devastation of the Holocaust.
Production Notes
Jul 7, 2016 — In honor of the director, we look back at his quintessentially American narratives.
Jan 13, 2016 — In Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis focused his lens on the world of Italy’s female rice workers, for a story that’s part social commentary, part pulp melodrama—and introduced the world to a dazzling young actress named Silvana Mangano.
May 29, 2015 — A shocking chapter of Soviet Czechoslovakian history is dramatized in Costa-Gavras’s controversial follow-up to Z.
May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.
Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...
May 16, 2014 — Did You See This?• Over a hundred years of special effects in three minutes • Cannes queen Jane Campion on her career • Life on the Croisette • A history of eating in the movies • British cinema gets sticky....
Short Takes
Aug 7, 2013 — In 1958, in the midst of his most fecund cinematic period, Yasujiro Ozu made his first color film, the splendid Equinox Flower. Like so many of Ozu’s films, this poignant drama is about the subtly difficult emotional landscape navigated by...
Apr 17, 2012 — When it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista! depicted something previously unseen in American fiction films—the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of view. Though writer-director-cinematographer Robert M. Young was not Latino and didn’t speak Spanish, his film convincingly...