The Criterion Collection
The Daily
Sep 5, 2024 — Homegrown cinema makes a strong showing this year with new films from Sofia Bohdanowicz, Kazik Radwanski, and David Cronenberg.
Jul 17, 2024 — Glauber Rocha’s ambitious breakthrough film manifested the project of Cinema Novo, a new wave that sought to overcome the influence of Brazil’s colonial origins and find images and sounds that could reconceive the nation.
Features
Apr 21, 2022 — In 1948, leftist filmmaker Leo Hurwitz directed a documentary whose title summed up the uncertainty of its moment: for America’s antifascists, the end of the Second World War was a Strange Victory indeed. Using newsreels from the war’s front lines,...
On the Channel
Jun 10, 2019 — The growing presence of unabashed queerness in contemporary culture makes the past seem comparatively drained of it. But it was always there. There’s often a queer history that lies beneath our accepted mainstream hetero narratives. When excavated, these histories can...
Sep 28, 2010 — “The past, again and again.” —Major Jack Celliers, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Nagisa Oshima’s filmmaking career began with the risen sun—or rather, with the promise of a sun soon to rise: Tomorrow’s Sun (1959), a dizzyingly designed faux “coming attraction”...
May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton
May 19, 2021 — A confession: before I made my first trip, a few years ago, to the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in Toronto, I had seen precious little Indigenous cinema. The average cinephile in the West watches predominantly films made by...
Essays
Feb 16, 2021 — “Me myself, I prefer literature,” the Senegalese author-filmmaker Ousmane Sembène tells a group of African students in the 1994 documentary Sembène: The Making of African Cinema. “But in our time, literature is a luxury.” Sembène’s historical conjuncture—Africa’s putative transition from...
Nov 13, 2018 — Turning to theater for inspiration, Kenji Mizoguchi transformed a popular eighteenth-century play into a spiritually charged meditation on forbidden love and societal oppression.
The Daily
Oct 2, 2023 — Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Jamie Bell, and Claire Foy star in a melancholic story of romance and reconciliation.