The Criterion Collection
Criterion Designs
Sep 24, 2015 — The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a film with the look of a lush period piece and the structure of postmodern metafiction. When it came time to design the cover, we wanted something that would emphasize the ways the film makes...
Short Takes
Aug 26, 2015 — Here’s an item of interest to everybody who feels Bob Dylan’s words are pure gold. Like last year, when Dylan’s original handwritten lyrics for “Like a Rolling Stone” were sold for over two million dollars at Sotheby’s, an original typewritten...
Short Takes
Aug 25, 2015 — Bill Hader and Fred Armisen’s hilarious new IFC Channel show Documentary Now! started last week, and already we can’t get enough. Of course, it helps that the crackerjack comedy team (one of whom is an avowed Criterion fanatic) launched the...
Mar 9, 2015 — François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.
Features
Dec 28, 2014 — In person, Sam was a blunt-nosed nonconformist, small of stature but forever leading with his Cuban cigar.
Essays
Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...
Production Notes
Jul 18, 2012 — John Lurie reminisces about making Down by Law and Fishing with John.
Essays
Jun 27, 2012 — The warrior and philosopher protagonist of The Samurai Trilogy, Musashi Miyamoto, was a real-life seventeenth-century figure. Here, the translator of Musashi’s The Book of Five Rings tells us about this fascinating man and his principles of swordplay and spirituality.
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...
Interviews
Oct 7, 2011 — For Janus Films’ new print of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, which starts showing today, designer Steve Chow created an eye-catching poster that vividly captures that New Wave battering ram’s apocalyptic, sideways vision. This is the third Godard design that Chow has...