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.
May 11, 2021 — Dorothy Arzner’s deeply cynical portrait of marriage exemplifies the director’s ambivalence toward the norms dictating female behavior, wielding ironic detachment to mask one woman’s simmering inner turmoil.
Features
Jan 20, 2018 — On what would have been Saul Turell’s ninety-seventh birthday, Peter Cowie celebrates the man who was the beating heart behind Janus Films.
Short Takes
Sep 10, 2015 — Noah Baumbach asks one of his idols, Brian De Palma, about the stunningly elaborate museum sequence in Dressed to Kill.
Mar 20, 2013 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s adroit masterpiece is war film, dark comedy, historical drama, poignant romance, and a portrait of the modern woman.
May 26, 2026 — Top prizes go to films by Cristian Mungiu, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Valeska Grisebach, Paweł Pawlikowski, and Los Javis.
Essays
Feb 24, 2026 — Centered on the emotional unraveling of a failed newsman, this darkly prescient satire envisions the collapse of American society as we knew it through an unsparing critique of corporate media and capital accumulation.
Oct 1, 2025 — In his second stop-motion feature, Wes Anderson grapples with what it means to acknowledge one another within systems that separate beings between pet and master, wild and tamed.
Aug 25, 2025 — In such provocative delights as Jamón jamón and Golden Balls, one of Spain’s most original directors celebrates the sensual pleasures of food and sex while capturing the rapid changes his country experienced at the turn of the millennium.
May 13, 2025 — In this masterpiece of lived-in ethical complexity and high spiritual stakes, Abbas Kiarostami explores the tensions between provinciality and modernity, and between artists and their subjects.