The Criterion Collection
The Daily
Jun 10, 2020 — As we remember the first African American to win an Oscar on her 125th birthday, HBO Max temporarily removes the movie she won it for.
Feb 20, 2018 — Robert Rodriguez, Frank Darabont, and Guillermo del Toro discuss the groundbreaking casting of African American actor Duane Jones as the lead in Night of the Living Dead.
Jan 25, 2018 — With the recent passing of Hugh Masekela, we’re looking back at the South African jazz luminary’s unforgettable performance in Monterey Pop.
Nov 29, 2017 — Tracy Letts is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. He received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for drama for his play August: Osage County and a Tony Award for his portrayal of George in a revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia...
May 28, 2013 — For Haskell Wexler, the director of Medium Cool, and the Oscar-winning cinematographer of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bound for Glory, writing about his ten favorite Criterion films became a trip down memory lane. His responses, made up of...
Feb 5, 2009 — “Around the time that the KKK rode to victory in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Al Jolson applied burned cork to his face in The Jazz Singer (1927), and scores of African-American actors bowed, scraped, shucked, and jived in...
Essays
Feb 12, 2007 — The trailblazing career of the extraordinary singer, actor, and activist was pivotal to the emergence of a black film aesthetic and, by extension, an African-American cultural identity.
Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...
Essays
Sep 8, 1998 — In David Lean’s Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio “working girl” on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni,...