The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 27, 2016 — In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.
Nov 18, 2015 — Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood applied cinematic specificity and flair to the literary realism of Truman Capote’s classic “nonfiction novel.”
Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.
Short Takes
Oct 28, 2015 — For over fifty years, the brilliant composer and conductor Carl Davis has been enriching cinema with his evocative film scores. Although well-known for his silent movie work—he's created orchestrations for the re-releases of films like Harold Lloyd’s Speedy and Charlie...
Sep 8, 2015 — Brian De Palma magnifies the pleasures and perils of Hitchcock and toys with the viewer’s spectatorship in his sly and scary horror masterpiece.
Aug 17, 2015 — François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.
Jul 13, 2015 — “I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” That was Eric Rohmer,...
Apr 14, 2015 — Before he turned Vienna into a labyrinth of shadows with The Third Man, Carol Reed brought film noir to Belfast for this stylishly fatalistic tale of a man caught up in political violence.
Essays
Mar 30, 2015 — The astonishing intimacy and scope of this remarkable, aesthetically captivating epic ushered in a new era of narrative documentary filmmaking.
Features
Mar 25, 2015 — Long unheralded and at last rediscovered, actor-director Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse is one of the key Hollywood features of 1947, the year film noir flooded the screen like a ruptured reservoir of India ink. Adapted from the popular...