The Criterion Collection
The Daily
Sep 25, 2017 — “During one of the meanest passages in American national politics within living memory,” writes Holland Carter in the New York Times, “we’re getting a huge, historically corrective, morale-raising cultural event, one that lasts four months and hits on many of...
Sneak Peeks
May 22, 2017 — A portrait of childhood, domestic life, and consumerism in postwar suburban Tokyo, Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning is one of the Japanese master’s most charming and subtly incisive comedies. Made in 1959, this loose update of the director’s own 1932 silent...
Dec 3, 2013 — This scathing drama about a toxic society established Elio Petri as an important director of popular political entertainment in Italy.
Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.
Essays
Oct 25, 2011 — The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.
Essays
Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...
Aug 29, 2023 — Exalting Black women’s self-invention with DIY effervescence, Drylongso (1998) is a gorgeously generous study of friendship, creativity, violence, and survival. The multidisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith developed the idea for the project from her habit of taking Polaroid photographs. Shot on...
Essays
May 1, 2021 — Filmmaking, at its best, has always sought to bear witness to, and create new perspectives on, our lived realities. But no one has mined the eccentric possibilities of the cinematic medium to address the vertiginous social and cultural changes borne...
May 21, 2013 — It’s tough to tell where reality ends and fiction begins in Haskell Wexler’s deft chronicle of a turbulent era.
Essays
Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...