The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 5, 2022 — Bong Joon Ho’s fantasy blockbuster explores the follies of global capitalism through the lens of the meat industry—and a young girl and her “superpig” best friend.
Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...
Apr 9, 2013 — This review by film critic Janet Maslin originally appeared in the December 27, 1991, edition of the New York Times, and appears by permission of the author. Naked Lunch, adapted by the dauntless David Cronenberg from William S. Burroughs’s 1959...
Dec 16, 2014 — The prolific and popular Keisuke Kinoshita made his fascinating first movies at a time of great difficulty and censorship, yet their spirit and brilliance shine through.
Dec 21, 2017 — No one has captured the complexities of forbidden love with more intimacy than Celia Johnson in David Lean’s classic romance.
Aug 28, 2012 — A frenetic portrait of New York as well as a love story, Paul Fejos’s film captures the odd sensation of being alone in the big city, even when in a crowd.
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...
Jun 8, 2022 — The Indian director, actor, and producer’s early death has enshrined him as a tragic icon in public memory. But there is more to his art than misery.
Jul 23, 2021 — Deep Dives In later years, Buster Keaton referred to his signing of a contract with MGM as “the worst mistake of my career.” In 1928 it was purely a business decision. The last few films he had made for his own...
Mar 26, 2021 — In her hypnotic, uncategorizable films, the director serves as a channel for images that emerge from deep within her unconscious.