The Criterion Collection
Feb 26, 2020 — Karel Zeman belonged to an obsessive fringe fellowship of moviemakers that stretched right back to the medium’s first formative days—a lineage of auteurs who believed in cinema as a full-blown daydream machine, capable of realizing inhabitable fantasias. These were filmmakers—practical-effects...
Apr 16, 2019 — Most proper New Waves of the 1960s came equipped with a rough balance of assimilable superstars and genuine radicals, and for the Czechoslovaks, the guerrilla flank was led by Jan Němec. Jiří Menzel was adored globally for his wry humor,...
Mar 28, 2019 — Flashbacks No filmmaker of his generation from Eastern Europe could match the charisma and originality of Dušan Makavejev. Forever bustling from festival to festival with his inspiring wife Bojana Marijan—who contributed to the sound and music on many of his...
Mar 26, 2019 — It’s the afternoon of February 8, 1964, and Ed Sullivan has assembled a gaggle of CBS ushers to talk about tomorrow night’s show, featuring the four lads from Liverpool who call themselves the Beetles—strike that, the Beatles. He needs to...
Jan 25, 2019 — Deep into Cristian Mungiu’s 2007 drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, we sit in on a leisurely dinner-table chat that appears to be unrelated to the film’s main event, an illegal abortion conducted in a seedy hotel. After...
Jun 26, 2018 — John Waters’ favorite among his early works is both an assault on political correctness and a no-holds-barred expression of gay militancy.
Aug 10, 2017 — We are thrilled to announce the December 5 release of 100 Years of Olympic Films, a landmark box set that documents the history of the Olympic Games through the lenses of an international array of filmmakers.
Jul 4, 2017 — The great character actress delivers a lusty, unbridled performance as a preacher’s daughter in this late-career gem from John Huston.
Dec 21, 2016 — Garrett Brown in our kitchen reenacting a Steadicam-shot scene from Blow Out In 1975, the cameraman Garrett Brown revolutionized filmmaking technology with the Steadicam, an invention that brought together the agility and immediacy of a handheld camera with the smoothness and...
Sneak Peeks
Dec 16, 2016 — Earlier this week, we released our edition of John Huston’s 1950 heist film The Asphalt Jungle, whose combination of meticulous plotting and sympathetic characterization remains a blueprint for the genre. Set amid the smoky streets of an unnamed city in...