The Criterion Collection
Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.
Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.
Feb 24, 2003 — Few political films transcend their historic moment quite like Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s depiction of West Germany in 1975, when the anxiety about terrorism eroded basic democratic values.
Essays
Oct 15, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s beloved comedy provides insights into the way Hollywood formulas work on us.
Dec 18, 2000 — Elegant humor cloaks despair in Luis Buñuel’s masterwork, wherein greedy characters flee their toxic lives and find refuge in the loneliness of dreams.
Essays
Dec 22, 1992 — With a script by Graham Greene, Carol Reed’s thriller plays upon the classic themes of trust, innocence, betrayal, and truth through the lens of a precocious eight-year-old.
Essays
Mar 11, 1991 — Lawrence Kasdan’s second directorial effort is a story about the sixties generation's idealism—as well as his most personal movie.
Essays
Oct 12, 1987 — Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling Cinemascope epic is set squarely within the traditions of the Japanese film genre known as the “Chambara.”
Sep 29, 2026 — With their mix of comedy, ecstasy, and aesthetic strangeness, the French auteur’s first three features grant us access to psychic states that we might not otherwise be able to enter.
The Daily
Sep 9, 2026 — Greene ventures further into a territory where fiction and nonfiction are up to a lot more than a mere blurring of the lines.