The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 10, 1993 — Green for Danger is a welcome twist on that most venerable of English concoctions, the drawing-room thriller. In this instance, the drawing room is instead a hospital not far from London, where surgery is conducted under a cascade of German...
Aug 12, 1991 — It is 1945. For the first time in four years, the Southern Pacific stops in Black Rock. A one-armed man named John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. This brooding stranger makes the few residents who inhabit the...
Sneak Peeks
Aug 16, 2019 — In making her nonfiction film The Inland Sea (1991), a poetic chronicle of a journey around the Japanese islands of the eponymous body of water, director Lucille Carra relied on a tried-and-true itinerary. A 1971 travelogue by Donald Richie, also...
Sneak Peeks
Oct 1, 2018 — Professor Imani Perry details how Lorraine Hansberry’s own experience of housing discrimination made its way into her landmark play.
Sneak Peeks
Mar 31, 2017 — Like his famously enigmatic landscapes, the performances that anchor Michelangelo Antonioni’s films are integral to his vision of existentialist ennui. Among the most iconic is David Hemmings’s turn in the Italian master’s first English-language feature, Blow-Up, a psychological mystery that...
Mar 18, 2026 — Born in Pereira, Colombia, Lucrecia Dalt has carved out a distinctive space in contemporary music. Her trajectory from civil engineer to sound artist began while working at a geotechnical company in Medellín, where she discovered computer-based music production—a revelation that...
The Daily
Oct 24, 2022 — A lively new podcast traces the history of German cinema in the Weimar era.
Sep 9, 2019 — In his thought-provoking latest book, the critic and frequent Criterion contributor traces the complex ways European filmmakers have grappled with the influences of Christianity and modernity.
Mar 15, 2011 — Based on Louis Malle’s childhood memories, this period drama traces the wary, prickly friendship between two boys, one of whom is hiding from the Nazis.