The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 21, 2017 — The result of a tumultuous production, Orson Welles’s eccentric take on Othello infuses the play with a convulsive rhythm and disorienting sense of abstraction.
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...
Essays
Jun 30, 2016 — In Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film Clouds of Sils Maria, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart play out a story centered on the complexities of female relationships, the making and undoing of boundaries between people, and our anxieties about the passage of...
Jun 30, 2015 — Annie Baker is the writer of the play The Flick, the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, which is playing at the Barrow Street Theatre in New York until January 10, 2015. Her other plays include Body Awareness...
Feb 26, 2015 — Ben Wheatley is the director of Down Terrace, Kill List, Sightseers, and A Field in England. He says: “Criterion, to me, has always been an exclusive collection. It stood out due to the choices they made and the design. But...
Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.
May 16, 2012 — Chuck Klosterman is the author of seven books (most recently, The Visible Man and Eating the Dinosaur) and serves as an accidental narrator of the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits. Of compiling this list, Klosterman says,...
Feb 22, 2012 — Oren Moverman, who appears as a visitor to the theater in Vanya on 42nd Street, is the cowriter and director of the 2010 Oscar-nominated The Messenger. He served as a screenwriter on I’m Not There, Married Life, and Jesus’ Son,...
Nov 29, 2011 — Author Michael Korda (Charmed Lives: A Family Romance) writes: Few things are more challenging than picking ten favorites out of such a long list of distinguished films as that of Criterion, and it seems only fair to point out that,...
At Criterion, cinema is king, but the play is also the thing. Here’s a selection of films that adapt great works of theater for the screen.