The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 22, 2006 — Luis Buñuel’s merciless satire concerns the smallness of our vision of progress and our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning.
Mar 27, 2006 — The Italian drama marked the first full blossoming of director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s ongoing collaboration.
Essays
Jul 11, 2005 — Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story balances realism and fantasy.
Essays
Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...
Essays
Aug 18, 2003 — The third installment in Ingmar Bergman’s trilogy about religious faith sees the auteur coming to terms with the pious rigidity and strangled emotional life of his own upbringing.
Aug 18, 2003 — The two versions of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist romance offer case studies in Hollywood and European sensibilities as they existed in the early 1950s.
Jan 11, 1988 — In Young and Innocent (1937) Alfred Hitchcock uses all the signs in his visual vocabulary to tell one of his favorite stories: fugitive hero unjustly accused of murder. Yet this is also a story of youth and innocence triumphant—a light...
The Daily
Mar 6, 2026 — Jonathan Rosenbaum returns to the Reader, there’s a new Cineaste, plus: Hiroshi Shimizu, John Akomfrah, and Robert Vas.
Feb 19, 2025 — Gus Van Sant’s lyrical exploration of addiction and faith—adapted from an autobiographical novel by James Fogle—influenced cinematic drug depictions throughout the nineties and helped to initiate a wave of American independent filmmaking.
Short Takes
Oct 20, 2015 — Koko the gorilla has found some new friends.