The Criterion Collection
On the Channel
Jul 24, 2019 — Ida Lupino had long since established herself as a Hollywood star when, in 1949, she stepped behind the camera for the first time. She didn’t intend to direct Not Wanted, a drama about an out-of-wedlock pregnancy that she cowrote and...
The Daily
May 19, 2019 — The Austrian director, a Cannes regular, is in competition for the first time with a chilly tale of a happiness-inducing flower.
Essays
Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.
Aug 17, 2021 — D. A. Pennebaker turns his camera on Stephen Sondheim and the cast of his breakthrough musical in this revelatory documentary about artists at work.
Apr 16, 2021 — Few motifs in Indian cinema are as potent, as laden with history and meaning, as the train. In 1955’s Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray immortalized the railways as the symbol of an alienating modernity in a newly independent India; in a...
Features
Jan 10, 2020 — How many times, in cultural history, has surrealism been declared out for the count? For the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in 1929, surveying the surrealist literature of André Breton, Robert Desnos, and Louis Aragon, the glory days of this...
The Daily
Feb 6, 2018 — “A jolt of a movie, Black Panther creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth.” So begins Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. “Most big studio fantasies take you out for...
The Daily
Jul 12, 2017 — La telenovela errante, a film Raúl Ruiz shot in 1990 (image above) and now fully realized by his widow and editor, Valeria Sarmiento, is one of the highlights of the lineup for this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The seventieth edition...
Sep 20, 2013 — Did You See This?• J. Hoberman revisits Shock Corridor. • Watercoloring the movies • Donald Richie to be honored • Time Bandits’ journey to the screen • Adam Curtis’s documentary attack • Howard Hampton slacks off. • Agnès Varda then...
Mar 13, 2012 — In the becalmed atmosphere of today’s Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine the tumult that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ when it was released in 1988. Brilliantly directed by Martin Scorsese, this adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the...