The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.
Nov 6, 2006 — The circumstances of our first encounters with movies are often as memorable as the movies themselves. Sometimes the juxtaposition of movie and circumstance seems merely accidental; but there are those films that change us enough that we can identify the...
Essays
Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...
Essays
Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.
Jul 6, 2020 — The latest short film to take the spotlight on the Criterion Channel, Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s Dirt Daughter emerged from the collaboration of a vibrant community of artists. Not only was it produced by the innovative collective the Eyeslicer, which supports...
Interviews
May 29, 2019 — In Anna Biller’s vibrantly colored fantasias, there’s not a glimmer of a sequin that hasn’t been envisioned by the artist herself. A writer, director, actor, producer, editor, composer, costume and production designer, and set decorator, she’s a one-woman studio, building...
Short Takes
Feb 2, 2016 — In November of 1974, German filmmaker Werner Herzog began walking from Munich to Paris. He had just learned that his friend and mentor, the film historian Lotte Eisner, was gravely ill and had been hospitalized in Paris, and Herzog decided...
Essays
Oct 30, 2014 — Tati’s witty visual comedy also functioned as satire of a rapidly modernizing postwar France.
Essays
Jan 14, 2014 — Jules Dassin’s atmospheric, genre-defining heist thriller combines American virtuosity with French cool.
Essays
Mar 15, 2011 — In Edward Yang’s cinema in general, and in Yi Yi in particular, character and environment are inseparable.