The Criterion Collection
Essays
Sep 26, 2011 — No preconceptions. No rehearsals. No rules. Assayas's on-the-fly bio is exhilaratingly all over the map.
May 5, 2009 — Irecently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given...
Oct 20, 2008 — Costa-Gavras’s film pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role.
Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.
Features
Apr 17, 2006 — In the absence of a finished, definitive edit of Orson Welles’s enigmatic project, three writers dive into the unsolvable mystery of the film and the different versions presented in the Criterion edition.
The Daily
Jan 9, 2026 — This week: Conversations with Lav Diaz, Mira Nair, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.
Features
Apr 18, 2025 — When Mayor John Lindsay made it easier for filmmakers to shoot on location in New York City, he paved the way for a string of movies that captured the troubled metropolis in the late sixties and early seventies.
The Daily
Sep 24, 2024 — Films by Agnès Varda, Chantal Akerman, and Rungano Nyoni screen in the Metrograph series.
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.
Essays
Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...