The Criterion Collection
Sep 13, 2004 — Fifteen years ago I received a letter from a young film director in Texas, who enclosed a tape of his first film, with the unlikely title It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. It might as well have...
Aug 20, 2001 — I have known Torben Skjødt since 1983. His debut video Englefjæs—which I thought to be very accomplished—was presented during a film week in Silkeborg. A debut work, yes, but made with a self-assured maturity by a self-taught creator of images....
Nov 18, 2025 — Though the first two decades of the Iranian filmmaker’s career have long been underappreciated, this fertile period yielded philosophical and restlessly innovative works that reinvigorated both documentary and narrative-fiction cinema.
Jun 26, 2025 — One of the defining independent films of its era, François Girard’s provocatively splintered portrait of the great pianist finds playful ways of toying with the cultural mythologization of its subject.
Jan 24, 2018 — One of the most memorable sequences in the silent classic People on Sunday explores the experience of being photographed and the tension between still and moving images.
Oct 2, 2014 — People struggle to escape their socially dictated roles in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s moving, Douglas Sirk–inspired melodrama.
Jun 27, 2011 — Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing, the late silent film People on Sunday (1930) has...
May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...
Nov 20, 2006 — It’s been a few weeks since Peter and I started this blog, and we are gratified that the response has been so positive. We debated for a while whether or not I should have hot-linked my email address last week,...