The Criterion Collection
May 19, 2026 — “Last night, I was in the Kingdom of Shadows,” proclaimed Maxim Gorky, writing about an 1896 projection of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. “Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and...
The Daily
Jan 21, 2025 — Lynchian may be impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.
Aug 28, 2023 — Throughout her four-decade career as a writer and director, Susan Seidelman has told complex stories about unconventional women striving to express themselves and maintain their autonomy. Her genre-melding films fuse a passion for the pleasures of Hollywood spectacle with a...
Features
Aug 11, 2023 — Back in the early 1980s, people were still trying to figure hip-hop out.Now in its fiftieth year, this cultural movement built by DJs, rappers, break dancers, and graffiti writers began in New York, spreading from the South Bronx to the...
Jun 22, 2022 — The long, quietly tense opening minutes of L’eclisse offer a blueprint for filmmakers looking to craft a devastating breakup scene.
Mar 1, 2022 — The first film I saw at last year’s Morelia International Film Festival opens on the image of a freshly dug grave. Shovelfuls of earth fall into the open pit as two doctors stand above it, lamenting the loss of yet...
The Daily
Mar 18, 2021 — The range this month is wide, from Tsai Ming-liang to Ida Lupino, from Tobe Hooper to Josephine Baker.
Essays
May 27, 2020 — In John Cassavetes’s Husbands, the director, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk play Gus, Harry, and Archie, three middle-aged, middle-class suburbanites who come together at the funeral of their close mutual friend Stuart, and, united in grief, commence drinking together. And...
May 21, 2020 — Deep Dives “Right then, get dressed!” my mother sang out once a year when I was a child. “We’re going down the Lane,” and I was at the front door with my coat on before she was. The Lane was...
Dec 11, 2019 — One Scene “Who can prove the genuineness of our feelings?” a character asks at one point in the Cannes-award-winning sci-fi drama Little Joe, the first English-language film by Austrian director Jessica Hausner. The question is as good a summation as...