The Criterion Collection
The Daily
Aug 25, 2017 — Cinephiles were shocked last month by the news that Hans Hurch, who had been the director of the Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale) since 1997, suffered heart failure in Rome, where he had been meeting with Abel Ferrara, and passed...
The Daily
Aug 21, 2017 — When Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas fled Lithuania in 1944 only to land in a Nazi forced-labor camp, Jonas began to keep a diary. Entries from that diary are gathered in I Had Nowhere to Go, out now from...
Essays
Mar 7, 2017 — With his unique blend of British realism and romantic fatalism, director Andrew Haigh exposes the quiet desperation at the heart of a long marriage.
Sep 20, 2016 — Cloaked in chiaroscuro and innuendo, this stylistically innovative creature feature leaves its greatest horrors to the imagination.
Mar 16, 2015 — Director and star Robert Montgomery suffuses his moody 1947 New Mexico–set noir with palpable postwar anxiety and expressive fatalism.
Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...
Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...
May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...
Short Takes
Mar 2, 2010 — If the harrowing, formally daring Hunger, just out in Criterion Blu-ray and DVD editions, left you wanting to deepen your acquaintance with director Steve McQueen’s visceral imagery, you’re in luck, at least if you live in the New York area....
Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.