The Past

Feb 20, 2024 — I have, over time, become wary of and impatient with the word authentic, especially when it’s too casually and blithely deployed, as it often is these days, to defame or diminish someone or something based on arbitrary standards of what...

Jun 25, 2021 — 1. Visions of Eight (1973) was the brainchild of producer David L. Wolper, whose film The Hellstrom Chronicle won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1972. Other notable credits of his include Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)...

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...

Apr 14, 2020 — Whether or not you believe it is the greatest year of all for the Hollywood studio system, the wonder of 1939 is the sheer depth of its bench. On a ten-movie best-picture ballot, the Oscars found no room to nominate...

Feb 15, 2019 — One of the most massively ambitious epics in the history of cinema, Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, opens today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater in a dazzling new restoration. Never before released in the U.S. in its...

Dec 1, 2017 — Press NotesOne of the great masters of melancholy comedy, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, returns to theaters today with The Other Side of Hope, his first film since 2011’s Le Havre. Continuing his empathetic exploration of global migration, Kaurismäki’s latest is...

May 30, 2017 — In his brilliantly inscrutable debut, Apichatpong Weerasethakul blends documentary authenticity with wild flights of imagination.

Aug 11, 2015 — The incredible Agnès Varda, now eighty-seven years old, stopped by the Criterion Collection office this past April to talk to us about the amazing, sometimes surreal experience of moving to California from France in the late 1960s and and again...

Mar 27, 2012 — Good wartime propaganda films are as rare as good wars. Noël Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve, which had its premiere in Great Britain in September 1942, when the nation was entering the fourth year of hostilities with...

Apr 12, 2011 — With his 1970 gangster epic Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.