The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 15, 2019 — In Notorious (1946), love assumes different shapes and presentations—as a wound, a weapon, a promise, a curse. For Ingrid Bergman as the lusciously complex and raw-nerved Alicia Huberman, it’s all these things. As the film begins, Alicia is on the...
Jan 8, 2019 — “Elements which can be eliminated have been eliminated” is how Abbas Kiarostami once described his late turn toward minimalism. While the Iranian director was known for the intricate, metatextual playfulness of his work, he also spent much of his career...
Apr 5, 2017 — At eighty-eight years old, Agnès Varda is still blossoming as an artist. Long known primarily as a filmmaker, a vocation she took up more than half a century ago, the French iconoclast is now in what she gleefully describes as...
Sneak Peeks
Nov 23, 2016 — After years of cultivating his immortal on-screen persona as a handsome, brooding outsider, Marlon Brando expanded his creative ambitions when he both directed and starred in One-Eyed Jacks, his first and only time behind the camera. Boasting VistaVision cinematography that...
Jan 5, 2016 — Toshiya Fujita’s two-film saga set exuberant, manga-inspired martial-arts choreography against a backdrop of a Japanese society in transition to unfold a vivid tale of epic vengeance.
Sneak Peeks
Nov 28, 2015 — We had some fun making the main menu for our new release of D. A. Pennebaker's groundbreaking documentary Dont Look Back. The menu’s video, a two-minute loop composed of rare footage from the film, is structured around an outtake of...
Sneak Peeks
Sep 13, 2013 — Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 La Cage aux Folles is not only an entertaining farce but also a landmark, for the way it opened many viewers’ eyes to both drag culture and same-sex relationships. To find out more about the film’s sexual...
Essays
Nov 22, 2011 — 12 Angry Men (1957), the first feature film directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, is a Hollywood classic that, ironically, helped to define an era of filmmaking grounded in the gritty realism and frenetic energy of urban New York. A...
Short Takes
Apr 27, 2011 — As those immersed in American film culture know, Austin, Texas, has been a growing hub of activity for the past twenty years. With the Austin Film Society, such locally based filmmakers as Richard Linklater and John Pierson, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the Austin Film Festival, the city...
Dec 7, 2010 — This exploration of how technology alters its users was not only prophetic but a personal artistic breakthrough for David Cronenberg.