The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Jan 24, 2011 — Ten years after the publication of the first edition of Planet Hong Kong and three years after it went out of print, the redoubtable film scholar David Bordwell has put out—exclusively online—a second edition of his acclaimed study of the national...
Dec 8, 2050 — By some remarkable alchemy, the modern Olympic Games and the cinema were born at nearly the same moment—between June 1894, when the first Olympic Congress was held in Paris under the inspired and visionary leadership of the French aristocrat Pierre...
Apr 22, 2026 — “The wig has a name. The wig’s name is Pam.”I was not even a little surprised to hear that Dallas-born filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary had given a name to the bouncy brown bob she wears in her film The Giverny Document...
Jul 13, 2021 — Miles: I just sold a building on the Lower East Side and tripled my money Molly: There’s a lot of that happening these days. Released the year before Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Working Girls, a film about sex work, is a sharper by far...
Jan 7, 2021 — That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) is often referred to as Luis Buñuel’s “testament” work, the apotheosis of his remarkable career as a filmmaker. It perfectly blends the type of outrageous surrealism he pioneered in the late twenties and early...
Oct 1, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 The film world and ordinary people(s) in the four corners of the globe have long awaited the home-video release of Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun, 1970), the groundbreaking feature debut of one of Africa’s...
Features
Apr 10, 2020 — Songbook Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is the War and Peace of Taiwanese juvenile-delinquent movies. It is also part of a tradition of films that use the process of a character slowly learning a single song as a narrative-building...
Apr 5, 2017 — At eighty-eight years old, Agnès Varda is still blossoming as an artist. Long known primarily as a filmmaker, a vocation she took up more than half a century ago, the French iconoclast is now in what she gleefully describes as...
Interviews
Oct 30, 2015 — The following interview was originally published in the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews included in the book were conducted by Rodley between 1993 and 2005. For Criterion’s release of Mulholland Dr.,...
Features
May 22, 2015 — It is one of my most strongly held critical beliefs that you should not write about films you don’t like. First, it is bad for the soul to exult in pointing out the deficiencies of the film in question. Second,...