The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 18, 2020 — In what was no doubt an appeal to subtitle-averse audiences, advertisements for the U.S. release of Teorema (1968) trumpeted, “There are only 923 words spoken in Teorema—but it says everything!” A meager few of those utterances are expended in an...
In Theaters
May 21, 2015 — Repertory PicksWhen cinematographic genius Max Ophuls made his first Technicolor, CinemaScope extravaganza (also, sadly, his last, due to his death), he pulled out all the stops. Lola Montès, his ravishing biopic of the notorious nineteenth-century courtesan, is the kind of...
Essays
Oct 30, 2014 — Tati’s witty visual comedy also functioned as satire of a rapidly modernizing postwar France.
Short Takes
Apr 6, 2010 — Many things set Red Desert apart from Michelangelo Antonioni’s other early sixties portraits of spiritual and social alienation (its focus on industry and environmental toxicity, for one), but none do so more strikingly than its color cinematography. It was the...
Feb 2, 2010 — Dear Criterion collectors, Our three least favorite initials: OOP. Since we launched the Criterion Collection more than twenty-five years ago, we’ve endeavored to keep everything we’ve published in print. But despite our efforts to renew rights, we are losing a...
Jan 12, 2010 — 8½: a bizarre and puzzling title, but one precisely appropriate for this film, which announces in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema. If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8½ surely goes beyond any predecessor...
Essays
May 5, 1998 — John Woo’s last film made in Hong Kong before his emigration to the U.S. reflects the city's anxieties and state of crisis throughout the decade.
Peter Guralnick has written extensively on American music and musicians. His books include a prize-winning two-volume Elvis Presley biography, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, and Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. He is currently at work on...
Jun 11, 2018 — Alexander Payne will direct the story that originally appeared in the New Yorker in 2013.