The Criterion Collection
Essays
Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...
Sep 3, 2007 — Very few movies count as truly significant milestones in the development of American “indie” cinema during the last quarter of the twentieth century. They include Eraserhead (1977) and Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), as early trailblazers; She’s Gotta Have...
Nov 6, 2006 — The circumstances of our first encounters with movies are often as memorable as the movies themselves. Sometimes the juxtaposition of movie and circumstance seems merely accidental; but there are those films that change us enough that we can identify the...
Essays
Feb 14, 2005 — A touchstone of Jean-Luc Godard‘s political period, the film plays with the idea of recording working-class history as it is happening.
Essays
Jun 4, 2001 — Mad with images of nature in rebellion, Luis Buñuel’s 1964 film is a droll vision of Eden during the Fall starring a sumptuous Jeanne Moreau.
Essays
Mar 11, 1991 — Lawrence Kasdan’s second directorial effort is a story about the sixties generation's idealism—as well as his most personal movie.
Essays
Dec 3, 1990 — Over the years I have had a recurrent nightmare in which I am summoned to a large, unfamiliar building in a middle-European satellite country (Bulgaria, perhaps) to tell the idea of Annie Hall to the Bulgarian Minister of Green Lights,...
Essays
Feb 11, 1990 — Bob Rafelson’s ultimate road movie is a relaxed masterpiece, a film of laid-back innovation that hasn’t aged one iota since its original release.
Mar 9, 2015 — François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.