The Criterion Collection
The Daily
Jul 31, 2017 — Broadway World has broken the sad and startling news that “playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard has passed away. Shepard, who had been ill with ALS for some time, died peacefully on July 27 at his home in...
The Daily
Jul 27, 2017 — Venice International Film Festival director Alberto Barbara has presented the lineup for the seventy-fourth edition (August 30 through September 9) at a press conference in Rome. I’ve gathered notes and trailers.CompetitionAi Weiwei’s Human Flow. From the Hollywood Reporter’s Tatiana Siegel:...
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.
Jan 11, 2017 — A revelatory restoration of Lewis Milestone’s underappreciated newsroom comedy accentuates the film’s punchy rhythms and breakneck banter.
Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.
Oct 25, 2016 — On their way back to Mumbai, the filmmaking pair dropped in for a chat about their film The Cinema Travellers, which documents the last traveling-cinema exhibitors of the western Indian state of Maharashtra.
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.
Essays
May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.
May 27, 2015 — Costa-Gavras’s political drama sheds disturbing light on the violent methods used by governments to maintain order.
Features
May 7, 2015 — Movie comedies about moviemaking through the decades