The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...
Jul 10, 2018 — The martial-arts film was never the same after King Hu got his hands on it, reinventing the genre with subtle editing and dazzling choreography.
The Daily
Jun 16, 2017 — The title of the first part of Tom Paulus’s projected three-part essay for photogénie, “The Love Connection: Another Jam Session on Narrative,” references “Jam Session on Non-Narrative,” a conversation that took place between film critics Jonathan Rosenbaum, David Ehrenstein, and...
Essays
Dec 2, 2013 — With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.
Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.
Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.
Dec 6, 2011 — The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the film that best exemplifies Alfred Htchcock’s often-asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Even Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, in their pioneering study of Hitchcock, for...
Essays
Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .
Oct 16, 2006 — Screenwriter Carlos Cuarón delves into the character played by Astrid Hadad
Jun 17, 2025 — Drawing from over a dozen hours of black-and-white footage, Direct Cinema pioneer Charlotte Zwerin created this elliptical and moving portrait of one of American music’s most original artists.