The Criterion Collection
Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.
Jun 17, 2013 — The silent legend practices slapstick with clockwork precision in his most iconic, astonishing comedy.
Essays
Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...
Mar 25, 2013 — Robert Bresson’s prison-break story is a tale of religious faith and a work of striking purity.
Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.
Apr 24, 2012 — Among the most widely seen photographs of Hollis Frampton is one of him as a young man, a self-portrait taken in 1959, if we are to trust the narration he composed to accompany its inclusion in his 1971 film (nostalgia)....
Essays
Mar 20, 2012 — Even more than with most documentaries that set out to record events as they happen, there was a lot of luck involved in producing The War Room (1993). When they turned their attention to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992,...
Essays
Oct 4, 2011 — Director Catherine Breillat writes about the primal pleasures of watching Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious film.
Aug 24, 2011 — NOTE: The following essay contains spoilers. Not long into Lee Chang-dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), a melodrama about suffering, salvation, and the dangerously blurred line between belief and madness, the heroine encounters the first of several challenges to her way of...