The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Nov 30, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating the seventy-third birthday of one of American cinema’s most lyrical and enigmatic storytellers. Over the course of more than four decades, Terrence Malick has established a distinctive aesthetic that juxtaposes the majestic beauty of nature with the...
Apr 14, 2015 — Before he turned Vienna into a labyrinth of shadows with The Third Man, Carol Reed brought film noir to Belfast for this stylishly fatalistic tale of a man caught up in political violence.
Feb 1, 2011 — This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the 2006 DVD release of The Double Life of Véronique. A new life experience is in the air today, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders...
Nov 24, 2009 — For twenty years, the remains of television’s self-proclaimed golden age lay dormant in the vaults of the commercial networks. I remember traveling, as a young researcher for NBC, to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the old shows of the fifties...
Oct 6, 2008 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career.
Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.
The Daily
Jul 1, 2026 — BAM’s thirteen-film series dips into chapters of American history that tend to get overlooked on Fourth of July weekends.
The Daily
Jun 12, 2026 — We’re hunkering down with an oral history of Steven Spielberg and reading about Mary Harron, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Radu Jude, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
The Daily
Jul 25, 2025 — Kenneth Lonergan and Terry Gilliam check their to-do lists and Vincent Price meets Greta Garbo.
Essays
Apr 29, 2025 — In this exuberant and moving portrait of a Brooklyn sex worker, Sean Baker draws on themes he has explored throughout his career, depicting the workaday grind of twenty-first-century American existence with biting humor and clear-eyed humanity.