The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 11, 1999 — It was quite a surprise to learn that David Lean had not read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations before he embarked on his film version in 1945. The closeness of the adaptation, the understanding of the characters, make one swear it...
Nov 6, 1989 — If you had to choose one movie to have with you while stranded on an island, the choice might well be Lawrence of Arabia. Considered by many as one of the greatest films ever made, it received seven Academy Awards...
Jan 4, 1988 — The Secret Agent (1936) came to life in the prime of Alfred Hitchcock’s British period. It arrived between the popular triumph of The 39 Steps and the box-office rejection of Sabotage, a more daringly downbeat work. Secret Agent partakes of...
Sep 16, 2025 — A portrait of a new generation of feminist consciousness in the New York art world, Lizzie Borden’s first film project spikes with a persistent friction between the filmmaker and her documentary subjects.
Short Takes
Jul 30, 2016 — Art director Eric Skillman describes working with Jack on the design for our release of Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as one of the highlights of his career.
Jul 30, 2013 — A genuine American movie legend, the eighty-seven-year-old producer and director Roger Corman has been in the film business since the early 1950s. He is perhaps best known for the low-budget horror films he issued with remarkable speed in the early...
Nov 21, 2008 — Music director at Los Angeles’s KCRW radio station, Tom Schnabel started the daily program Morning Becomes Eclectic in the 1980s, first bringing world music to U.S. radio with such artists as Buena Vista Social Club, Ravi Shankar, and Caetano Veloso....
The actor, who stars in Todd Solondz’s Happiness, shares his appreciation for the playwright behind the source material of George Cukor’s Holiday; praises It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World as one of the funniest films he has ever seen;...
Dana Polan teaches cinema studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He is the author of eight books on film and cultural studies, including a volume on Jane Campion in the British Film Institute’s World Directors series,...
Geoffrey Nowell-Smith is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History at Queen Mary, University of London, where he directs a research project on the history of the British Film Institute. He is the editor of The Oxford History of...