The Criterion Collection
May 3, 2011 — French auteur cinema has increasingly been exploring themes of sex through scenarios whose explicitness verges on the pornographic. Along with Patrice Chéreau (Intimacy, 2001), Léos Carax (Pola X, 1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi (Baise-moi, 2000), and Gaspar Noé...
Essays
Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...
Oct 16, 2006 — Screenwriter Carlos Cuarón delves into the character played by Astrid Hadad
May 22, 2019 — Everyone’s all in for the first two acts of this love letter to Los Angeles—but for many, the third is a deal-breaker.
The cinematographer of Bound and The Matrix talks about the thrill of watching John Ford’s Stagecoach for the first time, praises Martin Scorsese’s love of music, and picks up a recommendation from his granddaughter—Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House.
Mayukh Sen is the author of Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (2025), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. He teaches film and television reporting and criticism at New York University and...
Apr 28, 2003 — The sense of the difficulty of a real assumption of adulthood gives François Truffaut’s final Antoine Doinel film an undercurrent of anguish, despite its surface lightness.
Jul 21, 2026 — At the beginning of Cruel Story of Youth (1960), the title splashes across the screen in fiery red. Each of the three Japanese words that appear offers a key to understanding director Nagisa Oshima’s breakthrough film and the energies that...
On the Channel
Jul 17, 2026 — Channel Calendars This month on the Criterion Channel, crank up the volume on our playlist of (actually good) rock biopics that go beyond cliché to explore the elusive place where inspiration sparks and musical legends are born. Our Southern Gothic...