The Criterion Collection
Features
May 31, 2019 — Cannes 2019 Cannes has been top dog in the festival world as long as anyone can remember. It was originally set to launch in 1939 as a conscious political reply by liberal democracy to the success of Mussolini in establishing...
Apr 17, 2019 — Dark Passages The old saying that there are no small parts, only small actors, has surely caused thespians of all sizes to roll their eyes and gnash their teeth. But there are performances that stick in the mind forever with...
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...
Jul 24, 2018 — A feast of sumptuous color and cinematic imagination, Powell and Pressburger’s postwar masterpiece is also a powerful reckoning with recent history.
Dec 17, 2017 — “He’s joking all the time if he feels he has an audience,” Barbet Schroeder said of Idi Amin in a 1976 New York Post interview.I think we know the type.Ugandan dictator Amin, the subject of Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A...
Essays
May 30, 2017 — Lino Brocka brought an invigoratingly personal and socially conscious vision to Philippine cinema with this gritty portrait of Manila barrio life.
Essays
Dec 14, 2016 — Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.
Oct 13, 2016 — From its diffusely structured narrative to its innovative cinematography, this radical western is a showcase for Robert Altman’s iconoclastic style.
Short Takes
May 24, 2016 — “I always thought of musicians as being the saints of our time,” says documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker in a recent interview for the New York Times on the subject of his 1967 vérité portrait of Bob Dylan Dont Look...
Sneak Peeks
Feb 25, 2016 — In Antonio Pietrangeli’s stunning 1967 character study I Knew Her Well, Stefania Sandrelli plays Adriana, an aspiring model and actress trying to make it in sixties Rome’s movie business and glittering social world. For Sandrelli, who was only nineteen years...