The Criterion Collection
Feb 29, 1988 — Marx Brothers aficionados have argued for years over the relative merits of A Night at the Opera and the “purer” Marx movies such as Duck Soup. Certainly there’s no comparison on a point-by-point basis: Duck Soup is a classic of...
Dec 1, 1986 — Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is one cult film that has also won over the cultivated buff. As Peter Morris remarks (in his Dictionary of Films): “Though one of the subtlest films of the genre, containing little...
Essays
Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.
Predators, prey, objects of study, companions. Here are the animals in the Criterion menagerie.
Jan 20, 2018 — “American Animals is nothing if not a movie that arrives at some very simple truths in the hardest way possible,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. “A slick, well-acted, and intensely self-reflexive docudrama from the director of The Impostor, [Bart] Layton’s first...
Jan 19, 2017 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.
Feb 8, 2019 — An actor in film, television, and theater, Raúl Castillo is best known for his portrayal of Paps in the critically acclaimed We the Animals, for which he was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and for his role as Richie...
Aug 29, 2018 — Philadelphia native Jeremiah Zagar’s first feature-length film, the documentary In a Dream (2008), premiered at the SXSW Film Festival and screened theatrically across the U.S. and in film festivals around the world. It was broadcast on HBO, shortlisted for an...
Essays
Apr 28, 2008 — It’s a fascinating tradition of children’s fiction that Albert Lamorisse’s film continues, evoking an Edenic world of children and animals living in harmony—one very far away from where we are.
The director of Creep, The Overnight, and Corporate Animals calls Wings of Desire the film that made him want to make movies, talks about his belated discovery of All That Jazz, and pays tribute to Wes Anderson.