The Criterion Collection
Essays
Aug 14, 2012 — The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.
Jul 20, 2018 — American audiences weren’t ready for Barbara Loden’s Wanda when it premiered in 1970. A stark portrait of a working-class woman (played with raw conviction by Loden herself) who breaks free of a miserable marriage, only to find herself on the...
Features
Jul 19, 2012 — I want to start with my favorite story about Carole Lombard. She began her career in Hollywood in her teens and, as we know, was very attractive. She found herself hounded by the wolves of Tinseltown but came up with...
Jun 27, 2024 — At their best, movies that showcase a sizable collective of virtuosic actors can give you the feeling of a rich ecosystem being brought to life.
Features
Jan 15, 2017 — To make the performance of a tedious, exacting, time-consuming task riveting to watch, it is only necessary for the activity to be illegal.
Jun 2, 2016 — Kings of the Road is the most “roadish” of Wenders’s road movies, a film about travel as a form of escape for two German men and the transitory bond they form along the way.
Aug 5, 2025 — From Grosse Pointe Blank to Singles to Trainspotting, some of the decade’s most memorable fusions of music and cinema brought underground culture to new heights of pop consciousness.
May 13, 2025 — In this masterpiece of lived-in ethical complexity and high spiritual stakes, Abbas Kiarostami explores the tensions between provinciality and modernity, and between artists and their subjects.
Apr 27, 2023 — Over the course of her four-decade career, the pioneering Indian documentary filmmaker has demonstrated the important roles that joy and pleasure play in the process of political change.
Jan 11, 2022 — A searing melodrama that lays bare the trauma wrought by white supremacy and privilege, Thomas Vinterberg’s second feature kick-started the Dogme 95 movement.