The Criterion Collection
Oct 26, 2022 — Deep Dives Every elliptical pleasure of Michael Laughlin’s Strange Behavior (a.k.a. Dead Kids, 1981)—the flattened post–Twilight Zone affect, the tableaux evoking Technicolor footage faded like old Polaroids, a host of cross-pollinated genre kinks—suggests outmoded code that’s been surreptitiously updated. Embracing...
Short Takes
May 18, 2016 — We were proud to announce earlier this week that Orson Welles’s legendary masterpiece Chimes at Midnight will be joining the collection come August. Back in January—while the Shakespearean epic was enjoying a theatrical run at Film Forum and we were...
May 3, 2016 — Last night, HBO premiered British filmmaker Adam Benzine’s Oscar-nominated documentary Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah. In interviews and dug-up footage, Benzine’s film traces the twelve-year production of Shoah, Lanzmann’s groundbreaking nine-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary. Shoah, which eschewed archival images...
Essays
May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...
Nov 11, 2008 — Groundbreaking modernist artist Paul Strand (1890–1976) might have been better known for his photography than his filmmaking, but the two films he directed are both extraordinary testaments to his brilliance. The first, his silent 1921 avant-garde masterpiece Manhatta, a luminous...
Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.
Apr 29, 2016 — This July brings two new Criterion releases in the United Kingdom: Stanley Kubrick’s satirical Cold War masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie.
Oct 8, 2024 — An otherworldly exploration of the realm between life and death, this horror masterpiece transcends its genre with its poetic, often unsettling use of fragmentation and discontinuity.