The Criterion Collection
Essays
Mar 28, 2017 — In his first English-language feature, Michelangelo Antonioni examines the elusiveness of the real through the lens of a murder mystery.
Jul 19, 2016 — Time is both inescapable and irretrievable in Alain Resnais’s boldly disorienting masterpiece, which stars Delphine Seyrig as a widow haunted by her memories of World War II.
Short Takes
Oct 4, 2012 — Louis Malle is remembered primarily as a fiction filmmaker, but he had a parallel career as a documentarian. In fact, he got his start in nonfiction: when he was just twenty-three years old, Malle was given the opportunity to collaborate...
Jun 28, 2011 — Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro is the funniest book ever written in, and about, the French language. When it came out in 1959, it “made the whole of France laugh,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who helped Louis Malle adapt it to...
Apr 12, 2011 — With his 1970 gangster epic Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.
Apr 12, 2011 — Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come...
Mar 23, 2009 — The most crowd-pleasing film of François Truffaut’s latter career is also one of his most personal, drawing from his memories of the German occupation of France, his schoolboy years and his lifelong infatuation with the creative arts.
May 12, 2008 — This intensely personal work about a self-destructive young man would help alleviate Louis Malle’s doubts about his career.
The Daily
Jun 12, 2026 — We’re hunkering down with an oral history of Steven Spielberg and reading about Mary Harron, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Radu Jude, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
May 19, 2026 — “Last night, I was in the Kingdom of Shadows,” proclaimed Maxim Gorky, writing about an 1896 projection of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. “Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and...