The Criterion Collection
Essays
Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s subversion of the samurai movie possesses the same gritty, stark realism with regard to imagery and body count, yet the tone is decidedly comic.
Oct 24, 2005 — Mirroring changes in awareness, politics, and lifestyle occurring across the globe, the chanbara (or Japanese swordplay film) underwent a significant metamorphosis in the early 1960s, acquiring a decidedly more radical spirit. Seemingly without warning, groundbreaking cinematic styles from beyond the...
Sep 19, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s tale of love and devilry in medieval France was a sensation during the German occupation.
Essays
Mar 17, 2026 — In her first and only theatrical feature, director Lynne Littman presents an unbearably intimate vision of apocalypse, focusing on the effects of a nuclear blast on one suburban American family.
Apr 14, 2015 — Before he turned Vienna into a labyrinth of shadows with The Third Man, Carol Reed brought film noir to Belfast for this stylishly fatalistic tale of a man caught up in political violence.
Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.
The Daily
Jun 3, 2026 — This year’s lineup features lots of music, another De Niro and Scorsese reunion, and an AI-generated feature.
Features
Apr 29, 2024 — From After Hours to Mikey and Nicky to Collateral, movies centered on the twists and turns of a single night give filmmakers the chance to boldly experiment with cinematic time and space.
Features
Jan 13, 2021 — About a decade ago, I went to see Welcome, or No Trespassing at Spectacle. It’s still the only time I’ve known anyone to project the movie, a 1964 satire of Soviet summer camps that was the debut feature of Elem...
The Daily
Nov 25, 2020 — A talk with Claudia Weill, a new issue of Cineaste, and an appreciation of playback singer Asha Bhosle are among this week’s highlights.