The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 18, 2011 — An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King; a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady; a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, a Musket...
Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...
Mar 2, 2009 — If Dillinger is dead, who will take revenge? There were movies once that began, “Custer is dead,” in which you could reckon that a lot of Indians were going to pay the price. This bizarre film by Marco Ferreri (only...
Essays
Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...
May 11, 2021 — When Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out, in the summer of 1982, I was almost exactly the same age as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy Hamilton, getting ready to start my sophomore year in high school. Like Stacy’s world-weary older...
The writer and director talks about the influence of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, shares his love for Original Cast Album: “Company,” and takes his chances on a series of blind selections.
The writer and director talks about Luis Buñuel’s surreal combination of the mundane and the absurd, shares what he learned from Martin Scorsese’s early shorts, and selects formative favorites like If. . . . and Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
The director of Fast Times at Ridgemont High talks about one of her favorite actors, Peter Lorre; Federico Fellini’s “ultimate explanation of creativity”; and her choice for the most heartbreaking film of all time.
The Daily
Aug 7, 2025 — A highlight among the many goings on in New York over the next several weeks is a tribute to Luc Moullet.
Jan 28, 2025 — The first of eight collaborations between actor James Stewart and director Anthony Mann centers on a prize rifle that ends up being both a magical object and a cursed one, sending every man who possesses it to a doomed fate.