The Criterion Collection
On the Channel
Apr 27, 2017 — The capstone to Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski’s brilliant career, the Three Colors trilogy explores the principles of the French Revolution—liberty, equality, and fraternity—through a series of intricately layered human dramas, culminating in 1994’s Oscar-nominated Red. This gorgeously photographed meditation on...
Short Takes
Feb 5, 2016 — Today marks the birthday of French New Wave pioneer François Truffaut. In celebration of his incredible life and body of work, revisit a selection of essays and Criterion supplements dedicated to the brilliant filmmaker and cinephile: “The face of the...
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...
Essays
Aug 25, 2014 — Love and death tango in Bob Fosse’s glittering ode to his own mortality.
Jun 10, 2014 — Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was...
Mar 7, 2014 — Did You See This?• Building Wes Anderson’s Hotel, and finding his Easter eggs • Awarding Chris Marker and Alain Resnais • Exploring early Fritz Lang films • What’s next for Paolo Sorrentino • Ghana posters a-go-go • Farran Smith Nehme...
Essays
Dec 16, 2013 — Here at last comes the time of ecstasy, of trances.Those who refuse to their senses the gift of trances shall wither.Brothers in trances, when will freedom come?They threw me out of my land and country.May my star shine. [. ....
Oct 23, 2013 — If there’s one quality that separates John Cassavetes’s movies from almost everybody else’s, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no lapses...
Essays
Jan 17, 2012 — “I felt they showed more of me than they’d said they were going to,” Catherine Deneuve remarked to Pascal Bonitzer in 2004, about the making of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de jour. “There were moments when I felt totally used....
Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...