The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...
Features
May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...
The Daily
May 1, 2020 — Everyone’s eager to make, show, and watch movies in theaters again. In the meantime, here’s plenty to see, hear, and read at home.
Apr 22, 2020 — Deep Dives The Forest for the Trees, by German filmmaker Maren Ade, is one of the deepest depictions of loneliness on-screen. After serving as a television producer and shooting two shorts, Ade made this first feature, based on her own...
The Daily
Apr 21, 2020 — What happens to the films slated to premiere at Cannes 2020? After all, the fall festival season is beginning to look pretty iffy, too.
Apr 14, 2020 — Whether or not you believe it is the greatest year of all for the Hollywood studio system, the wonder of 1939 is the sheer depth of its bench. On a ten-movie best-picture ballot, the Oscars found no room to nominate...
The Daily
Apr 13, 2020 — The director of House, dozens of experimental films, and thousands of commercials returned again and again to the devastation of the Second World War.
Features
Apr 10, 2020 — Songbook Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day is the War and Peace of Taiwanese juvenile-delinquent movies. It is also part of a tradition of films that use the process of a character slowly learning a single song as a narrative-building...
Apr 6, 2020 — An actress herself, Bosworth understood her subjects as few writers could. Plus: The latest in home viewing.
The Daily
Mar 17, 2020 — The economic impact of the coronavirus crisis is immediate and harsh, but the lessons to be learned have been there for the taking for decades.