The Criterion Collection
Dec 13, 2016 — John Huston’s meticulously calibrated crime film combines nail-biting suspense with a mood of Chekhovian regret.
Essays
Nov 22, 2016 — The result of a notoriously troubled production, Marlon Brando’s unorthodox western presents a brooding vision of human futility.
Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.
Oct 25, 2016 — On their way back to Mumbai, the filmmaking pair dropped in for a chat about their film The Cinema Travellers, which documents the last traveling-cinema exhibitors of the western Indian state of Maharashtra.
Jul 12, 2016 — Herk Harvey’s influential, low-budget horror classic Carnival of Souls is an eerie exploration of the mutability of place and the purgatorial state of dreaming.
Jan 19, 2016 — Inside Llewyn Davis takes its protagonist on a Hero’s Journey of characteristically Coen-esque proportions—a voyage at turns serious and comic, and framed by an exquisitely curated selection of folk melodies.
Essays
Nov 25, 2015 — Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about one man’s mortality offers a study in postwar Japan, Kurosawa vs. Ozu, and the realization that knowing how to die requires learning how to be alive.
Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.
Sep 23, 2015 — Bruce Beresford draws on a controversial episode of Australian colonial history from 1901 to create an electrifying drama that questions the moral certitude of war.
Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.