The Criterion Collection
Jan 21, 2008 — Agnès Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction.
Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.
Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...
Essays
Jun 21, 2004 — Nouvelle vague euphoria was at its height when Jean-Luc Godard made his enormously clever third feature.
On the Channel
Jun 22, 2023 — Our latest slate of programs dives into one of science fiction’s favorite themes, the film career of one of rock and roll’s greatest icons, and midcentury pulp from across the Atlantic.
Mar 10, 2023 — Primarily known as a costume and production designer, this multitalented visionary deserves to be more widely recognized as one of the most important creative forces behind the Czechoslovak New Wave.
Apr 1, 2019 — The artist, photographer, and filmmaker leaves behind one of the most varied and restless oeuvres in cinema.
Sneak Peeks
Mar 28, 2018 — Cinematographer Billy Williams talks about his experience creating the lush images and expressive lighting in Ken Russell’s boldly stylized adaptation of Women in Love.
Apr 22, 2016 — Writer Harold Schechter shares a list of five true-crime films that encapsulate the essence of fear—including collection favorites In Cold Blood, The Honeymoon Killers, and Badlands—in the Library of America’s biweekly Moviegoer column.
Nov 30, 2009 — The following essay was originally written for Criterion’s website in 2005, on the occasion of the DVD release of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. We have posted it here to coincide with BFI Southbank’s ongoing Hein Heckroth exhibition...