The Criterion Collection
Features
Feb 23, 2017 — An elder statesman of independent filmmaking, Samuel Fuller spun his newsroom and frontline experiences into his movies, developing a unique cinematic voice that was always raw and personal.
Dec 6, 2016 — This elegiac meditation on impermanence showcases Laurie Anderson’s playfully experimental approach to sound and image.
Short Takes
Dec 2, 2015 — This fall the British Film Institute inaugurated a season-long celebration of on-screen romance with LOVE, its UK-wide series of theatrical screenings and rereleases of classic film love stories—from Badlands to A Room with a View. In conjunction with this month's...
Interviews
Oct 16, 2014 — This past August, on the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. A short version of the conversation was...
Jun 25, 2014 — Hearts and Minds is the classic antiwar documentary film of the Vietnam era. It was released in 1974, one year after the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam and a year before North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front...
Essays
Jan 14, 2014 — Jules Dassin’s atmospheric, genre-defining heist thriller combines American virtuosity with French cool.
Essays
Sep 18, 2013 — This chapter about director Richard Linklater’s beginnings, from the 1996 book Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema, is by the former producer’s representative, creator and host of IFC’s Split Screen, and...
Oct 18, 2011 — Hair, There, and Everywhere Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a...
Essays
Sep 26, 2011 — Toward the end of Olivier Assayas's Carlos, a young French diplomat's wife goes to answer the door of their flat in Beirut and is greeted by a huge bunch of flowers—which immediately disappears to reveal a gun that shoots her...
Aug 31, 2011 — French sociologist Roger Caillois proposed that every form of human recreation could be placed somewhere on a continuum between two terms: ludus and paidia. The first of these represents games defined almost wholly by their rule systems. Crossword puzzles and...