The Swissmakers

Jan 4, 1988 — The Secret Agent (1936) came to life in the prime of Alfred Hitchcock’s British period. It arrived between the popular triumph of The 39 Steps and the box-office rejection of Sabotage, a more daringly downbeat work. Secret Agent partakes of...

Oct 12, 1987 — For more than forty years, The Seventh Seal has been a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged. It launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor,...

Dec 11, 1986 — If events had turned out differently, Orson Welles’s second film might well be widely regarded as “the greatest film of all time.”

Dec 9, 1985 — Movie thrillers may come and go, but after half a century, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps still reigns supreme. And not only for the sheer, breathless excitement of the story; the seamless construction; the chilling, beautifully realized atmosphere; and the...

Discover the best of contemporary cinema!

The performer, comedian, and author praises Hedwig and the Angry Inch as a drag-queen staple, discovers a lacerating self-portrait by Richard Pryor, and talks about the immense cultural impact of Paris Is Burning.

In June 2025, the New York Times published a list of the 100 best movies released since January 1, 2000, as voted on by more than 500 influential directors, actors, and other notable names in Hollywood and around the world....

Once every decade, Sight and Sound magazine polls film critics from around the world and issues a list of the 100 greatest films of all time. The 2022 edition features 64 films available from Criterion, including the one voted the...

The subjects of Crystal Moselle’s award-winning 2015 documentary show off their voracious appetite for cinema, saluting films by everyone from Stan Brakhage to Jean Renoir to Alex Cox to Wes Anderson.

The filmmaking duo talk about their love of black-and-white cinema, the influence of Carl Theodor Dreyer, and the epic scope of The Human Condition.