The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 5, 1995 — Kenji Mizoguchi departed abruptly from his earlier sentimental films into a world of acute realism with this bold critique of the position of women in contemporary Japanese society.
Essays
Apr 11, 1988 — Over the years countless films have been made about war, its horrors and its devastations—few, however, have been as moving and heartfelt as René Clément’s.
Oct 1, 2025 — In his second stop-motion feature, Wes Anderson grapples with what it means to acknowledge one another within systems that separate beings between pet and master, wild and tamed.
Essays
Sep 28, 2022 — Cameroonian director Dikongué-Pipa’s debut feature is both a manifesto on cinema’s capacity to bring about social change and a celebration of love and its possibilities.
Features
Sep 9, 2022 — James Wong Howe was a fighter, and he learned how to be one over the course of a turbulent upbringing. Born Wong Tung Jim in 1899, in the Chinese province of Guangdong, the man who would become one of the...
Dec 3, 2021 — What do amphetamines, intellectual property, and Sour Belts have in common? They all correspond to a letter of the alphabet that structures the world of Don’t Go Tellin’ Your Momma, the short-film companion to musician and filmmaker Topaz Jones’s funk-infused...
Oct 19, 2021 — The works of great artists have a way of reactivating fundamental questions about the nature and potential of an art form. In the case of filmmaker Lynne Ramsay, these questions revolve around a word that has been used routinely to...
Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles: Essential Films Come on now, honey sugarYou know your baby loveYou know just the other dayI was gonna take you to go see a movieSweet Sweetback . . . Stevie Wonder, “Sweet Little Girl,” 1972 We went...
Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...
Features
Nov 7, 2019 — Two of the most spellbinding scenes in any Hollywood movie: In the first, Judy Garland, bedecked in a cinched, blue-and-white-striped dress, and topped with a long, auburn wig, sings of her longing for “the boy next door,” her adorable, ginger-peachy...