The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 9, 1990 — Michael Powell’s war thriller ranks alongside Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent as one of the two finest amalgams of suspense and propaganda to grace the big screen during the years 1939-45.
Nov 12, 1990 — For a twenty-seven-year-old director with a smattering of television experience and only one prior feature, Steven Spielberg demonstrated an awesome mastery of the film medium when his first big production hit the screen in 1975. An instant and certifiable phenomenon,...
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
Dec 3, 1984 — Since the dawn of the sound era, an estimated 25,000 feature-length films have been produced—and that’s in the English language alone. When, in the early 1960s, an international group of film critics were polled as to their “number-one film of...
The Daily
Feb 7, 2020 — This week, we’re looking back on the work of Antonioni, Fellini, Cassavetes, and Mrinal Sen. Plus: Oscar talk!
On the Channel
Nov 4, 2018 — The actor-director talks about the college film course that introduced him to some of the giants of world cinema, including Robert Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu.
Sep 1, 2010 — The Winnipeg sculptor, painter, and collage artist Marcel Dzama’s eclectic choices for his top ten range from avant-garde underwater shorts (Painlevé) to noir (The Third Man) to New Wave (The Fire Within) to contemporary experimental (Guy Maddin). Dzama's work has...
Features
Aug 27, 2026 — The illuminating 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine follows the celebrated author on a journey through the American South, as he attempts to reckon with the legacy and losses of the civil rights movement.