The Documentary

Mar 22, 2017 — A stately satire of modern media consumption and American politics, Hal Ashby’s 1979 film Being There follows the fortunes of a childlike gardener named Chance (Peter Sellers), who becomes an unlikely celebrity of D.C. high society after attracting the attention...

Mar 10, 2017 — Even love that seems built to last might rest on a fragile foundation, a painful truth borne out to subtly devastating effect in Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years. In this delicately calibrated drama—featuring Charlotte Rampling and Tom Courtenay as Kate and...

Oct 13, 2016 — This morning, we were delighted to learn that Bob Dylan has been awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature for creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Sep 11, 2015 — Laura Poitras has proven to be one of the most daring and necessary voices in contemporary documentary cinema with such works as The Oath and the Oscar-winning Citizenfour. So we’re excited to hear that she, along with her fellow documentarian...

Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...

Mar 30, 2015 — A master of using the camera to draw truth from interview subjects, Errol Morris was unsurprisingly a candid and fascinating interview subject himself in new supplements we made for the Criterion releases of Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida and The Thin...

Sep 27, 2012 — A culinary, cinematic, and musical institution is as endangered as the eels in the Thames.

Oct 24, 2011 — “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” says the narrator of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. “It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of...

May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...

Jan 8, 2009 — The Australian Centre for the Moving Image begins a retrospective of the film work of groundbreaking photographer and multimedia artist William Klein on January 22, and to accompany its fourteen-film program, critic and Criterion contributor Adrian Martin has written an...