The Criterion Collection
Nov 8, 2010 — To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes...
Mar 26, 2009 — We have some good news: preorders are back at criterion.com! We’ve worked out some kinks in the system, and starting today you can once again order upcoming Criterion titles and your credit card won’t be charged until your order is...
Aug 21, 2006 — A key Gen-X comedy about postgraduate angst, Noah Baumbach’s debut feature is an uproarious union of wit and trauma.
Essays
Nov 22, 1999 — Grand Illusion is the masterpiece that earned Jean Renoir enormous acclaim in the United States, exciting the admiration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and running for 26 weeks in New York after its opening in September 1938. Banned in Italy...
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...
Short Takes
Jul 7, 2016 — Half a century after Jacqueline Susann’s sensational novel Valley of the Dolls became a best seller, this cult-classic portrait of glamour and excess is enjoying a fabulous comeback.
Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...
The legendary actor returns to Closet, where she shares her love for independent American gems such as Barbara Loden’s Wanda and Michael Roemer’s Nothing but a Man, talks about Roberto Rossellini’s work with Ingrid Bergman, and selects Italian cinema classics...