The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Feb 20, 2015 — In time for this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, we wanted to celebrate all the incredible women who have been nominated for best actress Oscars for their roles in Criterion titles. They range from the 1930s to the 2010s, and include...
Nov 17, 2014 — Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable’s effortless banter is pure magic, but Frank Capra’s comedy is rooted in the reality of the times.
Jul 23, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.
Jun 27, 2014 — Did You See This?• The enduring appeal of Charlie Chaplin • Ellen Burstyn, queen of Marvin Gardens • Growing up with Richard Linklater • When Steven Soderbergh talked to Gordon Willis • The Terrence Malick–Andrew Wyeth connection • Meet Mr....
Apr 26, 2011 — At once prestigious literary adaptation and slapstick buddy flick, this is something like a lowbrow art film, an egghead monster movie, a hilarious paean to reckless indulgence, and perhaps the most widely released midnight movie ever made.
Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...
Nov 27, 2010 — The New Jersey resort town of Atlantic City provides the backdrop for two distinctive films made at opposite ends of the seventies: Bob Rafelson’s 1972 The King of Marvin Gardens and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City, released in 1981. That decade...
Nov 26, 2010 — Early in Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show, as the wind from the Texas plains whips the small town of Anarene, the high-school senior Sonny Crawford (Timothy Bottoms) halts his recalcitrant pickup truck—Hank Williams is warbling “Why Don’t You Love...
In the midsixties, a new generation of directors rose to prominence, both within and outside of the studio system, leading to a renaissance that transformed American filmmaking.
Essays
Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .