The Criterion Collection
Features
Jan 29, 2021 — Dark Passages A nightclub floor show with dancers kicking and tapping under a scrim of cigarette smoke and the murmuration of an indifferent crowd. Couples listlessly swaying in a second-floor ballroom, the men clutching rolls of tickets and the ladies...
The Daily
Aug 6, 2019 — The groundbreaking filmmaker had a hand in inventing—and then reinventing over and again—the modern documentary.
Oct 23, 2013 — If there’s one quality that separates John Cassavetes’s movies from almost everybody else’s, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no lapses...
Jul 27, 2010 — Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as...
Essays
May 5, 1998 — Borrowing inspiration from doom-laden French crime movies like Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le samouraï and ancient Chinese chronicles of patriotic assassins, John Woo’s film is a passionate cinematic upheaval.
The Daily
Dec 22, 2025 — Kleber Mendonça Filho programs a series of films that have informed his slow-burning thriller.
Essays
Nov 18, 2025 — This tale of paranoia and romantic jealousy slyly combines the conventions of popular Mexican filmmaking with the surrealist sensibility that made its director, Luis Buñuel, a legendary figure in his native Spain.
Jan 30, 2024 — A kaleidoscopic work of literary adaptation, Dee Rees’s fourth feature film is anchored in a powerful fraternal bond between two men from opposite sides of the color line.
Feb 14, 2023 — Entrenched as an authoritative adaptation, this Oscar-winning hit is still admired, taught, and studied today for its spectacular re-creation of the past and its reinvention of the Shakespearean spoken word.
Aug 16, 2022 — The Safdie brothers drew inspiration from their childhood memories for their first feature as codirectors, a terrifying yet wondrous portrait of an unpredictable father.