A Self-Made Hero

Mar 20, 2026 — This week: Thierry Frémaux on the Lumière brothers, Lynne Littman and Jane Alexander on Testament, and Christian Petzold on Hitchcock.

Aug 12, 2025 — This remarkably sensitive yet jarringly violent romance epitomizes director Youssef Chahine’s late-fifties hybrid style, which combined elements of Hollywood entertainment with an unmistakably Egyptian spirit.

Aug 21, 2023 — Channel Calendars This September, the Channel welcomes you back to school . . . where something sinister is afoot. Our High School Horror collection brings together cult classics and teen-slasher favorites for a bloodcurdling look at the scary side of...

Oct 14, 2022 — Martin Scorsese remembers Jean-Luc Godard, Francine Prose admires Jafar Panahi, and Guy Maddin discusses his earliest and newest works.

Dec 7, 2021 — Regina King’s feature-film directorial debut envisions the true-life convergence of four prominent Black figures with empathy and moral urgency.

Apr 28, 2021 — Channel Calendars Next month, the Criterion Channel celebrates independent, pathbreaking, and underappreciated artists. We’ve got a retrospective devoted to Gena Rowlands (pictured), the indie-film legend whose acting blurred the line between life and performance; a centenary tribute to the great...

Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.

Mar 24, 2014 — Rome is as exquisite as it is suffocating in Paolo Sorrentino’s profound tale of contemporary entropy.

Aug 3, 2010 — Sanshiro Sugata: A Career Blooms Moviegoers the world over know Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1950) and the international classics that followed—Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, High and Low. The filmmaker’s dazzling technique made his genre tales about samurai...

Aug 14, 2006 — It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze,...