The Criterion Collection
Feb 24, 2026 — For this existential noir, Joel and Ethan Coen drew inspiration from crime-fiction master James M. Cain’s lean, hard-boiled style and interest in the quotidian world of work.
Jul 25, 2024 — During a tumultuous period in New York’s history, movies like Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, and Shaft found excitement and squalor in one of the city’s most infamous tourist attractions.
Jul 2, 2024 — Self-destruction is not only an aesthetic but its own subject matter in Sam Peckinpah’s deeply elegiac western, a towering masterpiece that examines American power and greed.
Essays
Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda The poster for the seventy-second Cannes Film Festival, held in May 2019, used a photograph taken during the shooting of Agnès Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954. Wearing rolled-up trousers, a shirt,...
May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...
Jan 11, 2017 — A revelatory restoration of Lewis Milestone’s underappreciated newsroom comedy accentuates the film’s punchy rhythms and breakneck banter.
Oct 18, 2016 — Guillermo del Toro’s anti–Wizard of Oz refracts the surreal traumas of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of a young girl.
Jan 21, 2008 — The feminist politics of Agnès Varda’s marital drama were ahead of their time, but it is on the level of form that the film is so unsettling and calls up contradictory interpretations.
Features
Oct 24, 2025 — This French art-horror master shocked audiences with a string of sexy vampire movies often centered on complex female friendships and women-ruled fantasy worlds.
Aug 19, 2025 — In his fifth and sixth feature films, Edward Yang sought to uncover what was hidden in Taipei society, often in plain sight, looking past the city’s shiny skyline to the fault lines beneath the surface.