The Criterion Collection
Mar 10, 2020 — In the fall of 1966, an unusual proposal reached the desk of Melbourne I. Feltman, vice president of Consolidated Book Publishers in Chicago. In a letter dated October 24, sent from the Maysles Films office in Midtown Manhattan, David Maysles...
Nov 21, 2019 — Every love affair requires a border crossing. The person you see across a crowded bar, or meet at a dinner party, or find on a dating app is another country altogether—maybe a nice place to visit, but do you really...
Essays
Nov 19, 2019 — In 1989, film critic Raphaël Bassan coined the term cinéma du look. Describing a tendency in French cinema that had begun in the early eighties and would continue into the nineties, Bassan identified commonalities in the work of Jean-Jacques Beineix,...
Oct 29, 2019 — Matewan opens in the pitch-black darkness of a West Virginia coal mine. A miner lights the carbide lamp on his helmet. The small open flame he wears provides the only flicker of light in this cramped space next to a...
Aug 23, 2019 — After more than three decades in front of the camera, Natasha Lyonne understands a thing or two about what makes on-screen charisma. Previously best known for her early-career performances in films like Slums of Beverly Hills and But I’m a Cheerleader, she has in...
Features
Jun 4, 2019 — The great Hollywood portrait photographs are like close-ups that never end. Cinema is an art of faces, and the chance to gaze at them, to get lost in them, may be the deepest thrill movies offer. In the darkness of...
May 14, 2019 — It all comes down to that first wink. About half an hour through Michael Haneke’s 1997 cause célèbre Funny Games, Paul (Arno Frisch), one of the two politely psychotic young home invaders who’ve taken a family captive, leads one of his...
Feb 6, 2019 — On the Criterion edition of Secret Sunshine, Lee Chang-dong describes his creative process as one of utter despair. That should come as no surprise to anyone who knows his work. Since making his feature debut, Green Fish, in 1997 at...
Essays
Dec 21, 2017 — With D. A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking concert film, rock music solidified its status as a universal language.
Dec 17, 2017 — “He’s joking all the time if he feels he has an audience,” Barbet Schroeder said of Idi Amin in a 1976 New York Post interview.I think we know the type.Ugandan dictator Amin, the subject of Schroeder’s 1974 documentary General Idi Amin Dada: A...