The Criterion Collection
Mar 24, 2026 — In this true-crime epic, Martin Scorsese combines his career-long exploration of amoral gangsterism with a sobering meditation on what it means to live on American soil.
Essays
Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda It’s the other famous shot in The Gleaners and I (2000) of Agnès Varda’s reaching hands. Not the one she said was taught around the world as the heart of her documentary-making, where, in...
Jul 25, 2016 — In his masterful reimagining of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, Terrence Malick meditates on the nature of beauty and America’s path from innocence to experience.
Jul 20, 2016 — In his staggeringly ambitious masterwork A Touch of Zen, Chinese filmmaker King Hu imbues dynamic scenes of combat with balletic grace and audacious stylistic experimentation.
Essays
Jun 30, 2016 — In Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film Clouds of Sils Maria, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart play out a story centered on the complexities of female relationships, the making and undoing of boundaries between people, and our anxieties about the passage of...
Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.
Nov 16, 2022 — After glimpsing his great-great-grandfather on-screen, a writer searches for the history of a landmark silent film.
Oct 25, 2022 — One of the few American films of its era directed by a Black woman, Kasi Lemmons’s feature debut advances a critique of patriarchy and asks questions about gender and sexuality that still resonate today.
Jul 22, 2022 — Entwined with the evolution of American culture, boxing movies have used the microcosm of the ring to tackle issues of race, class, gender, and labor.
Essays
Jun 29, 2021 — In Dee Rees’s ambitious and lyrical debut, the inner life of a queer Black teenager and poet is summoned in all its nuances and contradictions.