The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Aug 9, 2010 — We’re always tickled by the entries in the Guardian’s Films That Changed My Life series, in which directors and actors wax eloquent about the films that have been most formative for them. This week, the publication asked actor Alfred Molina...
Oct 16, 2006 — Alfonso Cuarón’s first film—a sex farce that pokes fun at Mexican culture, including a public-service AIDS campaign—emerged from Mexico’s beleaguered state funding system for cinema, and was initially shelved by the government.
Essays
Nov 23, 1998 — Harold Shand, the London crime boss at the center of The Long Good Friday, is more than an antihero. He’s the Antichrist, uniting bourgeoisie and barbarians in a simultaneous Pax and Pox Brittanica. With the “legitimate” help of cops and...
On the Channel
Nov 25, 2016 — Just in time for Black Friday, two cinematic masters playfully pillory consumerism for our weekly double feature: Yasujiro Ozu’s Good Morning (1959) and Jacques Tati's Mon oncle (1958). But these wildly different virtuosos mount opposite attacks, Ozu sweetly funny in...
Sep 17, 2024 — A vision of late-1970s London that foreshadows the political volatility of the Margaret Thatcher era, this gangster saga stars an unforgettably tempestuous Bob Hoskins as a little Englander with big dreams.
Mar 6, 2019 — Performances As Howard Hawks was preparing to make His Girl Friday, his 1940 version of the classic Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play The Front Page, he was determined not to repeat what he felt had been a problem with his earlier comedy Bringing Up...
Short Takes
Jan 19, 2017 — Ever wonder what, exactly, a “girl Friday” is? Over on his blog, scholar David Bordwell gets to the bottom of this and some other questions about Howard Hawks’s 1940 screwball masterpiece, a film that has beguiled him for almost fifty...
Sneak Peeks
Jan 12, 2017 — The Hollywood screwball canon is rife with witty zingers and provocative repartee, but when it comes to sheer speed, nothing in the genre holds a candle to Howard Hawks’s newsroom rom-com His Girl Friday. In what remains the most beloved...
Jan 9, 2017 — A feast of whip-smart banter, Howard Hawks’s protofeminist take on newsroom politics is the most grown-up of all remarriage comedies.
The Daily
Feb 11, 2026 — Opening Friday: Noir City in Seattle, the Nitrate Film Festival in Los Angeles, and Cinéma Du Cashiers in New York.