The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 29, 2001 — Invisible monsters suck out your brains! And that’s just for starters.
Apr 19, 1994 — Rivaled only by Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst as Germany’s greatest director of the silent age, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a tireless formal innovator exhilaratingly difficult to pin down. If his 1922 horror epic Nosferatu represented an apex of...
Dec 1, 1986 — Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is one cult film that has also won over the cultivated buff. As Peter Morris remarks (in his Dictionary of Films): “Though one of the subtlest films of the genre, containing little...
Oct 23, 2024 — This once-maligned horror film is an unsparing exploration of sexual violence, remarkably centered on a complex, fully realized female protagonist, played courageously by Barbara Hershey.
Nov 21, 2023 — The decades have flown by, but Mean Streets (1973) has not become the least bit dated, even though we know how the careers of all the principals have evolved in the years since, not to mention that the world just...
Features
Sep 22, 2021 — Writer-director John Huston blasted the fusty pieties that pervaded big-studio filmmaking in the post-Code era, whether as the progenitor of film noir with The Maltese Falcon (1941) or the brainy daredevil who threaded critiques of frontier capitalism, gold lust, and...
Jul 13, 2021 — One of the most remarkable Black films released in the 1990s, Bill Duke’s Deep Cover (1992) is an uncompromising film noir that uses the so-called war on drugs as its backdrop. The story follows Russell Stevens (Laurence Fishburne) as he...
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Oct 26, 2020 — The very first romantic kiss between men on American television happens in Marlon Riggs’s groundbreaking film Tongues Untied. That kiss is between two Black men, and one of them is Riggs himself. As of this writing, if you look up...
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Aug 13, 2020 — First Person In 1960 The Apartment was playing at Cinema Rialto and was advertised with a loud red poster. I was too young to see it at the time, but I do recall overhearing my parents describing it to their...