The Criterion Collection
The genre-obsessed British director celebrates cult classics that have made a deep impression on him.
May 19, 2026 — “My history’s burning up out here,” Ned Racine (William Hurt) tells his lover in the opening minutes of Lawrence Kasdan’s directorial debut, Body Heat (1981). Ned, a small-time attorney and local roué in his South Florida beach town, recognizes the...
Nov 25, 2025 — Inspired by Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Traumnovelle, Stanley Kubrick’s final film is a deeply personal examination of the fragility of marriage and the destructive power of sexual fantasy.
May 14, 2024 — Despite the harsh critical drubbing it received upon its release in 1960, Michael Powell’s lurid tale of obsession and violence is now widely regarded as a masterpiece—and as a key inspiration for an entire subgenre of “slasher” movies.
Feb 15, 2022 — Playful irreverence gives way to tragedy and transcendence in Leo McCarey’s 1939 masterwork, one of the defining romances of the Hollywood studio era.
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...
Apr 18, 2018 — Sofia Coppola lets us behind closed doors in ways that are beyond the imagining of the novel’s boy narrators.
Jun 20, 2014 — Peter Weir’s sun-dappled, sexually charged nightmare about a disappearance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia still unnerves due to its radical lack of resolution.
Essays
May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.