The Criterion Collection
Oct 2, 2014 — People struggle to escape their socially dictated roles in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s moving, Douglas Sirk–inspired melodrama.
Sneak Peeks
Sep 30, 2014 — When we first released Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 2003, we asked filmmaker Todd Haynes to provide a video introduction. The year before, he had released his masterful Far from Heaven, a reworking of Douglas Sirk’s...
In Theaters
Jul 31, 2014 — Repertory PicksThings are getting emotional at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image this August. As part of its recurring See It Big! series, the institution is presenting a selection of great Hollywood melodramas, from the 1930s to the 2000s,...
With themes of love, suffering, betrayal, sacrifice, and redemption, melodrama puts its audiences through the emotional wringer.
Essays
Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...
Visual Analysis
Dec 19, 2013 — It’s the most wonderful time of the year! But you wouldn’t know it from all of the melancholy Christmas films that have been made over the years. In this video essay, we investigate the longstanding tradition of bleak midwinters at...
Short Takes
Apr 26, 2012 — In honor of the great German émigré director’s birthday, here’s a short, quotable clip from the 1979 BBC documentary Behind the Mirror: A Profile of Douglas Sirk, more excerpts of which can be found on our release of All That Heaven...
On the Channel
Jan 30, 2020 — Check out what’s in store next month on our streaming service!
On the Channel
Feb 24, 2022 — Next month on the Criterion Channel, we’re pushing the envelope with a series of the pre-Code films made by Paramount Pictures, a centenary tribute to Pier Paolo Pasolini, and a collection of groundbreaking concert documentaries.
Apr 14, 2020 — Whether or not you believe it is the greatest year of all for the Hollywood studio system, the wonder of 1939 is the sheer depth of its bench. On a ten-movie best-picture ballot, the Oscars found no room to nominate...