Up to You

Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....

Oct 23, 2010 — In 1945, a teenage Stanley Kubrick was given a job as staff photographer at Look magazine, where he published more than nine hundred striking images, most of them in the realist style of New York School street photography. By the...

Oct 6, 2010 — Last month, we asked you to give us a hand in creating brief ad taglines for our October titles. The response, in comments on the Criterion Current, was so overwhelming that we had trouble narrowing it down. Congratulations to the...

Sep 16, 2010 — Seven years ago, I was a bright-eyed recent university grad who had just moved to the big city—Toronto—for the first time. I was struggling to find my path as a filmmaker, and at the Toronto International Film Festival that year,...

May 27, 2010 — Dismiss from your mind, momentarily at least, the John Ford we know, who could define himself with the three words “I make westerns.” Before Stagecoach (1939), Ford’s talking pictures played out in submarines, penitentiaries, and Scottish castles, in Mesopotamia, colonial...

May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...

Apr 7, 2010 — The smart folks at the niftily designed film website Not Coming to a Theater Near You are in the midst of a monthlong feature titled Love on the Run: The Films of François Truffaut. One essay and film at a...

Feb 5, 2010 — Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (Knopf) begins with an epigram that pretty well sums up Altman’s attitude toward “truth” and “realism” in cinema and life. “I don’t think anybody remembers the truth, the facts,” the great filmmaker said. “You remember...

Dec 21, 2009 — Me and Orson Welles is the latest film from director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused). Set in late-1930s New York, it’s both a nuanced, entertaining look at Orson Welles’s early career as founder of the Mercury Theater and a...

Dec 1, 2009 — New York artist Jason Polan (known to Criterion fans as the guy behind the “wacky animals” in our monthly newsletters) has been on a mission that’s, to put it mildly, ambitious. The goal of his ongoing drawing project, Every Person...