The Criterion Collection
In Theaters
Nov 3, 2016 — The George Eastman Museum screens John Frankenheimer’s 1962 psycho-political thriller in anticipation of election night.
Jul 20, 2016 — In his staggeringly ambitious masterwork A Touch of Zen, Chinese filmmaker King Hu imbues dynamic scenes of combat with balletic grace and audacious stylistic experimentation.
Jun 21, 2016 — Animated in Czechoslovakia amid a Soviet invasion, the French film Fantastic Planet, the third collaboration between René Laloux and Roland Topor, timelessly renders its surreal sci-fi story of captivity and resistance.
Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.
Mar 14, 2016 — It’s been more than fifty years since the release of The Manchurian Candidate, and yet the Cold War thriller remains just as heart-stopping as it was at its 1962 premiere. In the film, set in the early nineteen-fifties and adapted...
Short Takes
Feb 17, 2016 — It’s been nearly fifty years since the original release of Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging, yet the 1968 feature remains as viscerally powerful as ever. Oshima, one of the Japanese New Wave’s most prominent directors, made the film as a...
Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.
Essays
Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...
Features
Dec 28, 2014 — In person, Sam was a blunt-nosed nonconformist, small of stature but forever leading with his Cuban cigar.
Sneak Peeks
Dec 17, 2013 — Prepare yourself for The Housemaid. Available in our new collector’s set Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, Kim Ki-young’s twisted little tale, about a bourgeois family whose lives are thrown into dangerous disarray by the arrival of a live-in domestic, throws...