The Criterion Collection
Jul 22, 2022 — Entwined with the evolution of American culture, boxing movies have used the microcosm of the ring to tackle issues of race, class, gender, and labor.
Nov 25, 2010 — Five Easy Pieces is not a statement about America but a closely observed report. Or, perhaps, a confession.
Essays
Aug 20, 2007 — David Mamet’s debut film was a welcome throwback to the primacy of character and careful story construction, at a time when narrative intricacy was in short supply on American movie screens.
Essays
Feb 16, 2004 — Henri-Georges Clouzot took the standard ingredients of the Continental-Films detective movies and used them to make something darker and more complex—to make, in fact, the first classic French film noir.
Features
Mar 9, 2020 — “My objective is to create my own world, and these images which we create mean nothing more than the images which they are.” Andrei Tarkovsky More than three decades after his passing, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky retain their ability...
Oct 1, 2018 — A breathtaking, rarely screened vérité document encapsulates the social and aesthetic sea change that transformed France in the spring of 1968.
Apr 25, 2011 — In 1981, the legendary critic went all out for Blow Out, which she thought was De Palma's most mature work to date.
Oct 28, 2025 — The first of Arturo Ripstein’s films to receive wider international acclaim, this blood-soaked, surrealist vision of amour fou harks back to the director’s roots as an admirer and protégé of Luis Buñuel.
Essays
Jun 24, 2025 — The product of a famously tumultuous production, William Friedkin’s nerve-jangling adaptation of the classic suspense novel The Wages of Fear infuses the mechanics of genre with rough-hewn realism and the New Hollywood’s renegade spirit.
Apr 16, 2021 — Few motifs in Indian cinema are as potent, as laden with history and meaning, as the train. In 1955’s Pather Panchali, Satyajit Ray immortalized the railways as the symbol of an alienating modernity in a newly independent India; in a...