The Criterion Collection
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.
Jun 24, 2014 — In 1964, Richard Lester harnessed the Beatles’ exploding superstardom for a giddy day-in-the-life pop masterpiece.
Nov 22, 2022 — Deeply influenced by the classics of silent-era comedy, this vision of a postapocalyptic future celebrates cinema as a universal language that offers us a sense of common ground.
Features
Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...
The Daily
Nov 8, 2017 — Dave Kehr’s long reviews for the Chicago Reader, published between 1974 and 1986, comprise “a body of work that, together with Kehr’s columns for Chicago magazine in the 1980s, strikes me as being the most remarkable extended stretch of auteurist...
Jul 20, 2017 — Director Ken Loach and his longtime screenwriting partner Paul Laverty, recipients of this year’s Crystal Globe award at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, speak about the complex relationship between politics and cinema.
Features
May 2, 2017 — On a trip to the Library of Congress’s Mostly Lost workshop—affectionately known as “film-geek heaven”—Imogen Sara Smith joined early-cinema aficionados in uncovering treasures from the vaults.
Apr 12, 2016 — Howard Hawks’s 1939 aviation classic Only Angels Have Wings is an exemplar of the auteurist Hollywood entertainer’s capability to fuse “a personal existential statement and a delightful piece of showmanship.”
Apr 28, 2003 — The fourth installment in François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga is a comedy about marriage, the desire to escape it, and the craftiness involved in running from one’s own desires.
Features
Mar 3, 2020 — American cinema is over 125 years old, and African Americans have been a part of it from the beginning. This participation has often been fraught, stymied, and curtailed, but the desire to use motion pictures to craft a self-image has...