The Criterion Collection
Oct 27, 2014 — Though he emerged from established stage and screen comedy traditions, Tati invented a completely new filmic language.
Essays
Aug 4, 2014 — Rebellious children of the sixties become conflicted consumers of the eighties in Lawrence Kasdan’s elegiac comedy-drama.
Jul 24, 2014 — Everyday life gets a musical makeover in Jacques Demy’s tale of chance and love, a film of exquisitely sad happiness.
Jul 23, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.
Essays
Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...
Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.
Essays
Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...
Oct 9, 2012 — British wartime audiences ate up these rule-breaking costume pictures—entertainments for a populace seeking escapism.
Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...
Short Takes
Apr 14, 2012 — Before her critically acclaimed new HBO series Girls (premiering this weekend), before her breakthrough feature Tiny Furniture, writer-director-actor Lena Dunham had already made a name for herself posting short films on YouTube. Check out one of them, 2006’s Pressure, here....