First Love

Sep 14, 2015 — In his latest column, Peter Cowie reflects on his friendship with our beloved cofounder.

Sep 14, 2015 — Our CEO commemorates Criterion’s cofounder, who was also a friend, partner, and father figure.

Jul 30, 2015 — It is now thirty years since the release of Stephen Frears’s film, which was both a product of and a response to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain and depicted the lives of Pakistani immigrants with wit and...

Jul 22, 2015 — Stephen Frears brings a playful and shimmering cinematic quality to Hanif Kureishi’s multilayered script about a Pakistani immigrant community in Margaret Thatcher–era London.

Jul 7, 2015 — Our recollections of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 movie The Killers are apt to center on three primary elements: Ernest Hemingway’s story, so literally brought to the screen in the film’s opening scenes; Ava Gardner, carrying the full weight of that late-forties...

Jun 29, 2015 — This work of hallucinatory lyricism was one of the final and freest expressions of the rule-flouting New Wave movement in Czechoslovakia.

Jun 17, 2015 — Taking the form of a casual conversation, Louis Malle’s film about transformative experiences is an outgrowth of its writer-stars’ experimental theater days.

Mar 11, 2015 — More than thirty years after his death in 1977, Roberto Rossellini is remembered by your average film buff as the father of Italian neo­realism (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948) and of actress and model Isabella...

Feb 26, 2015 — The threat of death hangs over Watership Down, Martin Rosen’s wise and uncompromising animated adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel about rabbits on a survival mission.

Oct 2, 2014 — The following is a chapter on The Innocents from cinematographer Freddie Francis’s memoir, The Straight Story from “Moby Dick” to “Glory.” It is reproduced here courtesy of Scarecrow Press. The last picture I worked on as a cinematographer in my...