The Criterion Collection
Jan 8, 2013 — 01 Because it’s the purest American road movie ever. 02 Because it’s like a drive-in movie directed by a French new wave director. 03 Because the only thing that can get between a boy and his car obsession is a...
Essays
Jan 17, 2012 — At once a political epic and a radical gesture in personal filmmaking, Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic is an unexpected, unlikely triumph. It was a film that Hollywood didn’t want to make—every studio in town turned it down—that went on to secure...
Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Ozu Yasujiro’s personal feelings about Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s are not on record. Perhaps, like most people around him, he accepted the...
Jun 16, 2008 — Decades later, we’ve come to understand that Claude Sautet’s film—in a less gaudy and obvious, more secretive, insidious way—was just as revolutionary as Breathless.
Essays
Jan 11, 1999 — David Lean followed his prodigious adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations with this brilliant crystallization of Dickens’ Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. It deploys the cinema’s special powers of dash and immediacy to convey all the venturesomeness and...
Jan 14, 2025 — In this digressive, intensely interior masterpiece, Jean Eustache mines the dramas of his past romances while also capturing the disillusionment of young Parisians in the aftermath of May 1968.
Nov 8, 2022 — In her first film that places a male character front and center, Jane Campion trains her unsparing gaze on the brutality of patriarchal power and the pain of repressed homoerotic desire.
The Daily
Oct 14, 2021 — Voir is “a new documentary series of visual essays celebrating cinema.”
Sneak Peeks
Mar 23, 2015 — When we think of film noir, we think of shadowy city streets, often in Los Angeles or New York. But Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse, which we released last week, is one of a handful of dark-toned films made...