The Watch

May 27, 2020 — “A filmmaker shows what his career will be in his first 150 feet of film,” François Truffaut once wrote. He was talking about Jean Vigo at the time, but he might as well have been talking about Martin Scorsese, whose...

Mar 24, 2020 — How do you talk about Leave Her to Heaven without talking about Gene Tierney’s face? You can’t. Because its planes and curves, its cunning expressions and its tantalizing opacity, are such a central piece of the movie itself. A series...

May 18, 2018 — Improvising to Jim Jarmusch’s film in real time, Neil Young created a rich parallel environment that sounds like a force of nature.

Apr 5, 2017 — At eighty-eight years old, Agnès Varda is still blossoming as an artist. Long known primarily as a filmmaker, a vocation she took up more than half a century ago, the French iconoclast is now in what she gleefully describes as...

Feb 13, 2017 — One Scene Romantic love is poignant because it is an infinite feeling that exists in a finite frame. And Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy is the most romantic and profound of love stories because it imbues love with the weight of...

Dec 14, 2016 — Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.

Nov 25, 2015 — Last week, when John Waters stopped by Criterion for a visit, we asked the cult filmmaker (and connoisseur of holiday entertainment) for his recommendations of the films we should be watching this holiday season. Naturally, he responded with one of...

Oct 30, 2015 — The following interview was originally published in the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews included in the book were conducted by Rodley between 1993 and 2005. For Criterion’s release of Mulholland Dr.,...

Sep 26, 2014 — For this week’s festival of free films on Hulu, we put French bombshell Brigitte Bardot in the spotlight. The gorgeous actor, singer, and model burst onto the scene with Roger Vadim’s scandalous 1956 romp And God Created Woman, and was...

Mar 30, 2014 — 1. In 1964, Ingmar Bergman wrote a script for a film titled The Cannibals. It was to star Bibi Andersson, and included a small part for the up-and-coming Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, but it was ultimately tabled when Bergman became very ill...