The Criterion Collection
Essays
Aug 31, 2011 — A man and a woman are married in a small town. The wedding procession follows them to a canal barge, of which he is the master. His crew, an old salt and a young boy, await them there. The couple...
Dec 4, 2006 — A companion piece to Grey Gardens, this documentary stands on its own as a portrait of two women creatively passing the time as Rome burns.
Oct 15, 2001 — The French director’s crime film conveys both the flow and the form of the prison experience.
Sep 3, 2021 — In the thirty-fifth edition of the Italian festival dedicated to restored films, an eclectic lineup underscores the transportive physicality of cinema after a long year stuck at home.
Essays
Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...
Nov 19, 2020 — For most of my life, makeover sequences in film comedies held an irresistible allure. The mousy young woman who realizes her own inner and outer (but mostly outer) beauty after receiving the attentions of the right man (or the right...
Apr 28, 2020 — “Fuck! Fuck you fuck me fuck old people fuck children fuck peace! Fuck peace.”Miranda July shouts at her car’s steering wheel. With a black Sharpie, she scrawls FUCK in huge letters on the inside of her windshield. She drives. Sunlight...
Mar 17, 2020 — Released in, or rather let loose upon, the first year of the new millennium, Spike Lee’s febrile and ferocious media satire Bamboozled—the fifteenth feature-length “joint” of a prolific career—found its writer-director in an unflinching mode and an unforgiving mood. According...
Mar 19, 2019 — New work by the artist and filmmaker is on view in the UK and Norway and at the Big Ears Festival.
The Daily
Feb 11, 2019 — Thomas Heise, Stephan Geene, and Lei Lei innovatively reconstruct stories from the not-so-distant past.