The Criterion Collection
The writer-director of So Much Tenderness and This Time Tomorrow shares her love for the magnetic monstrousness of Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven, praises the visual grammar of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and talks about “impossible...
The director of American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol shares her love of B movies of the 1940s and ’50s, the metal soundtrack of Lost Highway, and the rapid-fire pacing of ’30s comedy.
The director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Fire of Love shares her passion for nonfiction filmmakers Chris Marker and Les Blank, and for the iconic love triangles in Jules and Jim and Y tu mamá también.
Mar 21, 2025 — Anthony Banua-Simon is an award-winning filmmaker and editor as well as an adjunct professor in film editing. His films Third Shift and Cane Fire have both played on the Criterion Channel. The films he has chosen for this list have...
Allison Anders is an award-winning film and television writer and director who got her first professional break working for her mentor, Wim Wenders, on his movie Paris, Texas (1984). Her feature debut was Border Radio (1987), cowritten and codirected with...
Jan 22, 2026 — A singular achievement in Arab film history, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s sweeping political epic is a memorial to the lives lost in the struggle for Algerian independence.
Criterion Designs
Sep 2, 2020 — Art speaks volumes in Céline Sciamma’s rapturous eighteenth-century love story Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and much of that is thanks to painter Hélène Delmaire. It is Delmaire’s vividly lifelike canvases that grace the film from start to finish,...
Apr 8, 2016 — Ten years ago, with the release of his debut film Reprise, a spirited drama about two young aspiring novelists, Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier emerged as one of the most interesting new voices in European cinema.
Essays
Jul 14, 2026 — In May of 1962, when Martin Ritt arrived in the Texas Panhandle town of Claude to begin filming Hud, he may have sensed that his career was about to change. Hud would be Ritt’s ninth feature but his first personal...
On the Channel
Jul 12, 2026 — Channel Calendars This month on the Criterion Channel, crank up the volume on our playlist of (actually good) rock biopics that go beyond cliché to explore the elusive place where inspiration sparks and musical legends are born. Our Southern Gothic...