The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.
Jan 6, 2003 — Ernst Lubitsch set the screwball comedy standard, treating hard-on material with dignified aplomb and a combination of suaveness, hilarity, and sexiness.
Feb 20, 2026 — Since the 1980s, Indigenous artists have turned to documentary filmmaking and a variety of experimental forms to reassert their cultural sovereignty and lay claim to their own narratives.
Essays
Sep 23, 2025 — A tale of animal survival in a world deserted by humanity, Gints Zilbalodis’s Oscar-winning triumph casts a hushed spell with its elemental storytelling, immersive visual style, and creaturely subjectivity.
The Daily
Sep 25, 2023 — This month brings collections on Straub-Huillet and Whit Stillman, an Anna May Wong biography, and a novel starring Marilyn Monroe.
Essays
Jul 15, 2020 — When I first saw The Lady Eve (1941), in my teens, I was certain I had never seen a comedy more perfectly constructed, a judgment that the subsequent decades have not revised. I had also seen none more acutely witty,...
Jun 17, 2015 — From a shrewd adaptation by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, Jonathan Demme fashions a visually inventive dreamscape out of an Ibsen classic.
Oct 25, 2013 — "I“m not acting,” stage star Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) tells her bemused director after a violent episode with her ghostly muse in Opening Night. That’s a loaded claim to be making in a movie that so conclusively smudges the line...
Essays
Jul 12, 2022 — In David Lean’s Venice-set romance, a fleeting love affair prompts a woman’s self-exploration.