The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 6, 1987 — Mike Nichols’s treatment of a young man’s initiation into the mysteries of sex at the hands of an older married woman has become a model for this common fantasy.
Dec 1, 1986 — Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is one cult film that has also won over the cultivated buff. As Peter Morris remarks (in his Dictionary of Films): “Though one of the subtlest films of the genre, containing little...
Nov 17, 1986 — The best of all the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn comedies, Adam’s Rib is as fresh and topical today as it was in 1949 when it was first released. Written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by George Cukor, this...
Essays
Dec 9, 1985 — Movie thrillers may come and go, but after half a century, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps still reigns supreme. And not only for the sheer, breathless excitement of the story; the seamless construction; the chilling, beautifully realized atmosphere; and the...
Visual Analysis
Nov 17, 2019 — Under the Influence As an aspiring filmmaker in the early nineties, Ira Sachs first sat down to watch Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feature debut, Je tu il elle, about an adrift young woman (played by the director herself) grasping for human connection. At the...
Short Takes
Oct 5, 2015 — We were saddened today to learn of the death of the great Chantal Akerman. Known most widely for her 1975 masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Akerman made precise, thoughtful, and aesthetically daring films—fiction features and documentaries,...