The Classic

Though remembered now primarily for his intense, spare 1960s gangster films, this French master had a startlingly varied career, encompassing wartime dramas and psychosexual character studies.

Mar 24, 2010 — Congratulations to the winner of our final Kurosawa birthday giveaway, Dan Thompson! He responded to our challenge to craft a single persuasive sentence for getting a friend who is unfamiliar with Kurosawa to watch one of his films with the...

Jul 7, 2008 — Every decade since 1984 the Toronto International Film Festival has conducted a poll of film scholars, critics, and directors to determine the ten best movies in the history of Canadian cinema. This top-ten list has changed somewhat over the years,...

Oct 15, 2018 — Film historian Ronald Haver breaks down one of classic Hollywood’s most iconic action sequences in this clip from our laserdisc release of King Kong.

Jul 1, 2018 — In one of Criterion’s earliest commentary tracks, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader talk about how they got lucky with their gripping New York City classic.

Mar 25, 2015 — Errol Morris’s revolutionary film boldly investigated the truth of a murder case while reimagining documentary cinema aesthetics.

Jun 17, 2025 — Mitchell Leisen’s marvelously chic and brilliantly constructed screwball classic revolves around a heroine who flounders through a succession of complications but always manages to come out ahead.

Jul 15, 2019 — After premiering at Cannes in 1980, Franco Rosso’s Babylon was suppressed both in its native England and abroad for fear that it would inflame racial tensions, a fate that resulted in decades of obscurity. But over the years this reggae-fueled drama has...

Jun 7, 2018 — “Film was a sort of rarified, special thing you might luck into,” says Marlon James, recalling his first encounters with the art form as a child in Jamaica. Growing up in Kingston in the 1970s, he got his cinema education...

Mar 29, 2018 — A daring portrayal of race, class, and sexuality, Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey plays at the British Film Institute in a monthlong tribute to Woodfall Films, one of the pioneers of British social realism.