The Criterion Collection
In Theaters
Dec 15, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis weekend, Jean Renoir’s La chienne will screen at the Trylon microcinema, in Minneapolis, as part of a monthlong series dedicated to the French master’s groundbreaking work in the 1930s. A thematic precursor to The Rules of the Game,...
Jun 17, 2016 — The late 1920s and early 1930s were wonderfully productive years for Jean Renoir and Michel Simon, a simpatico director-actor duo who produced four films together: Tire au flanc (which gave Simon his first starring role), On purge bébé, La chienne,...
Nov 6, 2015 — As part of the launch of the new French streaming video service La Cinetek—which was founded by the filmmakers Pascale Ferran (Bird People), Cédric Klapisch (Chinese Puzzle), and Laurent Cantet (Return to Ithaca), as well as Alain Rocca, president of...
Sneak Peeks
Feb 2, 2015 — Our release of the spellbinding La Ciénaga marks not only the brilliant Lucrecia Martel’s entrance into the Criterion Collection but also our first title from the New Argentine Cinema. To get a better idea of the importance and finer aesthetic...
Essays
Oct 30, 2014 — Tati’s witty visual comedy also functioned as satire of a rapidly modernizing postwar France.
Oct 27, 2014 — Though he emerged from established stage and screen comedy traditions, Tati invented a completely new filmic language.
Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.
Essays
Aug 14, 2012 — The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.
Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...
May 12, 2008 — Today it may be hard to understand the shock waves that Louis Malle’s romantic drama created with its “frank” depiction of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but in the context of late-1950s France, it was a bombshell.