The Criterion Collection
Production Notes
Sep 3, 2018 — The producers behind our edition of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece share stories they discovered from researching the film and the turbulent political climate that inspired it.
Essays
Jun 17, 2018 — The stakes are high. An unknown entertainer newly arrived in a foreign country prepares for her first performance, under pressure to make a hit with a restless, rowdy audience. It is a hot night; the crowd exudes a collective humidity,...
Jun 17, 2015 — Taking the form of a casual conversation, Louis Malle’s film about transformative experiences is an outgrowth of its writer-stars’ experimental theater days.
Nov 5, 2021 — A teenage girl looks on with both envy and disapproval as her mother shimmies on the dance floor in the arms of a lover. “Beautiful,” observes a friend. “I know,” says the daughter, bitterly, before falling asleep in her nanny’s...
Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...
May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.
Oct 1, 2018 — A breathtaking, rarely screened vérité document encapsulates the social and aesthetic sea change that transformed France in the spring of 1968.
Essays
Mar 4, 2002 — Wong Kar-wai’s biggest commercial success to date elevated him to the mainstream of international art house cinema, and it echoes the end of an era with pure melancholic power.
Feb 5, 2026 — In London, the BFI is marking the hundredth anniversary of Wajda’s birth with a series of eighteen films.