The Criterion Collection
Interviews
Sep 16, 2014 — The following interview is from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews in the book were conducted by Rodley between January 1993 and December 1996. Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been...
Feb 6, 2014 — Did You See This?• B-movie beauts • Meet “New Queer Cinema” coiner B. Ruby Rich. • Get to know your Derek Jarman. • Terry Gilliam at the movies • Alphaville and New Wave genre films • Writing by Charlie Chaplin—formal...
Aug 26, 2013 — From the beginning, it was clear that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was destined to shake up German cinema.
Sneak Peeks
May 29, 2013 — The beginning of Mike Leigh’s new audio commentary track for Criterion’s release of his poignant domestic comedy-drama Life Is Sweet is just too charming not to share here. In these first few minutes, which span the film’s opening credits, the...
Feb 21, 2012 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only work of science fiction, World on a Wire (1973) is surely one of the most obscure items among the forty-odd titles that constitute his filmography. Originally a two-part miniseries broadcast on West German television, it had...
Essays
May 24, 2011 — Andrei Tarkovsky belongs to that handful of filmmakers (Dreyer, Bresson, Vigo, Tati) who, with a small, concentrated body of work, created a universe. Though he made only seven features, thwarted by Soviet censors and then by cancer, each honored his...
Essays
Apr 22, 2010 — It’s easy to get anxious about the place of Jean-Luc Godard in our cultural slipstream. He’s held a top-shelf slot of honor that has seemed unassailable for nearly sixty years, but sometimes I fear that his currency is becoming drastically...
Feb 2, 2010 — Dear Criterion collectors, Our three least favorite initials: OOP. Since we launched the Criterion Collection more than twenty-five years ago, we’ve endeavored to keep everything we’ve published in print. But despite our efforts to renew rights, we are losing a...
Essays
Nov 22, 2009 — “The most concrete emblem of every economic cycle is the dump,” writes Naples native and best-selling Italian muckraker Roberto Saviano somewhere near the conclusion of his extraordinary 2006 “nonfiction novel” Gomorrah, a seethingly cogent and literarily constructed indictment of the...
Sep 22, 2009 — Abandoning the cinematic conventions and references that informed his previous works, Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive crime drama reaches new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention.