The Criterion Collection
Oct 10, 2017 — Two singing mermaid sisters take 1980s Poland by storm in this extravagantly mounted musical-horror hybrid.
May 20, 2025 — Set in the dying days of the 1960s, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical tale of two unemployed actors is a triumph of screenwriting and a brilliant showcase for then-unknown stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.
Features
Aug 9, 2022 — An indie pioneer whose life was cut tragically short, the Texas filmmaker found grace in the tedium of repressive small-town existence.
Essays
Feb 23, 2021 — Released in 1985, during the exuberant flowering of films by women brought on by second-wave feminism, Joyce Chopra’s Smooth Talk now feels less of those years than like a harbinger of the #MeToo movement, an early challenge to a cultural...
Dec 20, 2019 — The following account was scratched together in August 1990, when Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World was still taking shape in the editing room. Apart from a basic rinse of copy editing, I’m offering it up essentially as is,...
On the Channel
Nov 15, 2018 — If you loved the adventurous curated programming we’ve been doing with our friends at FilmStruck, we have good news for you.
Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...
On the Channel
Sep 10, 2018 — One of the pleasures of programming a new short-and-feature pairing every week on the Criterion Channel is getting to celebrate the artistic freedom that short films offer emerging artists. With tighter run times and smaller budgets, the form comes with...
The Daily
Nov 13, 2017 — Two of the most lucrative franchises in the history of franchises are being revamped, one for theaters, the other for home screens. “Star Wars: The Last Jedi writer-director Rian Johnson [above] has been set by Disney and Lucasfilm to write...
Sep 5, 2017 — “If the only thing we wanted, or expected, a horror film to do was to get a rise out of you—to make your eyes widen and your jaw drop, to leave you in breathless chortling spasms of WTF disbelief—then Darren...