The Criterion Collection
Jun 5, 2006 — Painful, beautiful, and discomfiting, Maurice Pialat’s coming-of-age drama remains as startling in its honesty, its unique mix of savagery and delicacy, as it was in 1983.
Jan 17, 2005 — Along with Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou, Casque d’or is now widely recognized as the summit of Jacques Becker’s achievement as a filmmaker.
Essays
Nov 15, 2004 — Short Cuts is an L.A. jazz rhapsody that represents Robert Altman at an all-time personal peak—and it came at just the right time in his career.
Essays
Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”
Dec 30, 2003 — Akira Kurosawa was a man of his time, who participated fully in the artistic and intellectual world of Japan from the 1930s until his death in 1998. Although filmgoers may think of him in terms of the screen images he...
Jan 5, 1993 — All right, I’ll just say it. Monty Python and the Holy Grail is the most sublimely irreverent, most jaw-droppingly hysterical movie of the last twenty years. How many films, after all, have Knights who say “Ni!,” filth-eating peasants, and 160...
Jul 9, 2026 — Deep Dives One of the most mischievous figures in world cinema, Věra Chytilová is still best known for Daisies, the daring 1966 film whose gonzo vision of female rebellion and empowerment launched her into the public eye. This Czechoslovak New...
Apr 25, 2023 — Steve McQueen’s monumental, five-film portrait of London’s West Indian community is a howl of endorsement for political resistance and a vivid indictment of institutional malaise.
May 5, 2022 — Has Asian American cinematic representation really reached unprecedented heights, as almost all recent film coverage on the subject claims? In the past two years, critics’ polls, New York Times features, and Golden Globes scandals have marked the newfound success of...