The Criterion Collection
Aug 19, 2013 — This moving drama about gender, race, and class in 1960s Kolkata is a pioneering work from Satyajit Ray.
Sneak Peeks
Jul 23, 2013 — The Oscar-winning Babette’s Feast has a cinematic flavor unlike any other film. Director Gabriel Axel invites viewers to swoon over the sensual and spiritual experience of the climactic meal as if they were eating it themselves. By the end of...
Jul 22, 2013 — Gabriel Axel’s exquisite adaptation of Isak Dinesen’s short tale of grace through art provides spiritual and sensual sustenance.
Essays
May 13, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.
Apr 16, 2013 — With its idiosyncratic humor, killer soundtrack, and middle finger to Reagan-era politics, Alex Cox’s film was the perfect cult hit for the golden age of the video store.
Essays
Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...
Mar 13, 2013 — The slimiest movie monster of them all is part of—and perfects—a great tradition of unstoppable outer-space invaders.
Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.
Jan 22, 2013 — Andrei Tarkovsky’s austere, minimalist, and poetic film was the first major accomplishment in an oeuvre that would become one of Russia’s main contributions to the treasury of world cinema.
Nov 5, 2012 — The following originally appeared as the afterword to the 2003 New American Library edition of the novel Rosemary’s Baby. Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears, I was struck...