The Criterion Collection
Jun 22, 2021 — This omnibus documentary captures the remarkable peculiarities of athletic striving in the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich.
May 25, 2021 — In Edmund Goulding’s gritty cult classic, Tyrone Power casts off his matinee-idol image to play a conniving carnival barker on the flipside of the American dream.
May 18, 2021 — The 1892 Chinese novel The Sing-Song Girls of Shanghai opens with a prologue in which the author, Han Ziyun, writes from his own perspective, providing a gateway into the book by describing a dream he has had. Referring to himself...
May 11, 2021 — Dorothy Arzner’s deeply cynical portrait of marriage exemplifies the director’s ambivalence toward the norms dictating female behavior, wielding ironic detachment to mask one woman’s simmering inner turmoil.
Features
Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...
Jan 28, 2021 — Deep Dives Domestic work offers both an agonizing ennui and the satisfaction of a necessary task being completed. In the 1981 documentary Clotheslines, filmmaker Roberta Cantow mines these two moods, as well as the subtler emotions that fill the distance...
Dec 17, 2020 — The year 1999 was several months old when I entered Los Guajolotes, a restaurant that, like so many others in Mexico City, has now disappeared. I was walking to my table when a person who appeared to live on the streets...
Dec 1, 2020 — The brochure for the 1961 Lincoln Continental line makes the six-seater luxury sedans look almost dainty. They come in pretty pastels: a cream called Sultana White, a fizzy yellow known as Sunburst, an ice-cream-parlor blue-green dubbed Turquoise Mist. A gloved...
Aug 18, 2020 — Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker’s restless, captivating Direct Cinema triumph Town Bloody Hall is a work of oceanography, documenting one splashy moment in the cresting and crashing of American feminism’s second wave. The film chronicles the “Dialogue on Women’s...
Jul 27, 2020 — The first shot of Atom Egoyan’s 1984 debut feature, Next of Kin, is a ground-level pan across the baggage claim section at Toronto’s Pearson Airport. The camera is angled so that our gaze is on the various pieces of luggage...