The Criterion Collection
Jul 3, 2020 — As The War of the Worlds is essentially a cautionary tale, each generation gets its own adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic account of extraterrestrial invasion—one of the several seminal science-fiction novels, also including The Time Machine (1895) and The...
Feb 20, 2018 — In this wildly inventive revenge drama, director Kon Ichikawa blurs the line between stage and screen, infusing kabuki traditions with his own extravagant visual sensibility.
Essays
Jun 1, 2017 — Suffused with a quiet radiance, this Kazakh New Wave masterpiece grapples with cultural displacement through an allegorical tale of vengeance.
Sneak Peeks
Jan 7, 2016 — View a clip from Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance, featuring actor Meiko Kaji in a scene that highlights the film’s dazzlingly choreographed combination of visual beauty and unflinching ferocity.
Mar 9, 2015 — François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.
Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...
Sep 22, 2008 — With their rotating casts of sourpuss Finns and their stringent compositions, Aki Kaurismäki’s films would seem the least likely candidates for laughs, yet his black-comic precision has made him one of the most warmly embraced filmmakers on the international art-house...
Jun 30, 2020 — Come and See (1985) is one of those films whose authority is established from its opening moments. Out in the open air, an elderly peasant dressed in a soft-peaked beret is volleying a mixture of threats and imprecations into some...
Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.
Dec 16, 2013 — A melodramatic investigation of family and class, Kim Ki-young’s film exorcises some demons of 1960s South Korean society.