The Criterion Collection
Features
Aug 6, 2019 — Once, in 1977, Werner Herzog read a news item about a volcano that was supposed to erupt in Guadeloupe and one man living there who refused to evacuate with the rest of the island’s population. Herzog being Herzog, he immediately...
Features
Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...
Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...
May 23, 2018 — About halfway through Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation (2016), Dr. Romeo Aldea (Adrian Titieni) finds himself in a patch of woods in the middle of the night, crying. It’s a surprisingly vulnerable moment for a protagonist who is usually all business. We’re...
In Theaters
Apr 7, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, the Janus Films touring retrospective of Wim Wenders’s work is making a stop at the Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine, to screen the iconic German director’s 1984 masterpiece Paris, Texas. Based on a script by award-winning...
In Theaters
Dec 29, 2015 — One refrain often heard in discussions of twenty-first-century film culture is a lament for the loss of social film viewing. While we celebrate the fact that digital technologies have given us convenient access to unprecedented numbers of movies, old and...
In Theaters
Jul 23, 2015 — Repertory PicksViewers at the Cleveland Institute of Art can get whisked away on a comic escapade this Saturday, July 25, with a 35 mm screening of Preston Sturges’s classic Sullivan’s Travels. This mix of satire and social realism from Hollywood’s...
Jun 25, 2014 — Hearts and Minds is the classic antiwar documentary film of the Vietnam era. It was released in 1974, one year after the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam and a year before North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front...
May 13, 2014 — Few national cinemas have confronted the issue of preparedness for war with the creative vigor of England’s. Thorold Dickinson’s The Next of Kin (1942), Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1942, from a story by Graham Greene), and, of course,...
Essays
Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.