The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 15, 2000 — Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, the first fully-achieved feature by the woman who would become the premiere female director of her generation, dazzled when it opened, and looks even more timely today in its tackling of the fashionable...
Essays
Oct 12, 1998 — Are there cultural purists still remaining who would argue that the “Westernized” title of Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 masterpiece—High and Low—throws polluted water on the cosmological fire of its given name: Tengoku to jigoku—literally, Heaven and Hell?Kurosawa’s once insisted-upon reputation as...
Apr 29, 2025 — A gritty look at New York City’s underground economy through the eyes of an immigrant street hustler, Sean Baker’s third feature film demonstrates his gift for combining hardscrabble social realism and mischievous humor.
Mar 18, 2025 — In what he described as his “first serious drama,” Charlie Chaplin channeled the influence of modernist literature, foreign cinema, and his European travels into a work of striking formal sophistication.
Sep 10, 2024 — Andrew Haigh explores loss and queer loneliness in this exquisite, twilit tangle of lives and loves separated by space, time, and personal defenses.
Feb 13, 2024 — Through its echoes, resonances, and intricately branching stories, this cycle of films evokes the feeling that life, like the weather, is based on patterns too complex to ever be fully predictable.
Sep 28, 2016 — The salacious sixties phenomenon of the Dirty Book made its way to the big screen in this adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s best seller.
The Daily
Jun 5, 2026 — A series of films Malle made in the U.S. opens with an excellent documentary on the director’s life and work.
Aug 20, 2024 — In her formally daring debut feature, Martha Coolidge stages a confrontation with the subject of date rape that questions the kind of “closure” required in conventional storytelling.