The Criterion Collection
Criterion Designs
Nov 30, 2016 — The Lone Wolf and Cub film series has its roots in Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s manga of the same name, which was itself a major influence on Western cartooning and illustration in the 1980s. It felt only natural to...
On the Channel
Nov 29, 2016 — Anahita Ghazvinizadeh’s short film Needle, which won the 2013 Cinefondation prize at Cannes, premieres today on the Criterion Channel as part of our weekly Short + Feature. I first met Anahita through programming the short at the Chicago International Film...
Nov 28, 2016 — PerformancesAny paean to noir seductress nonpareil Gloria Grahame—mine included—can’t hope to surpass this encomium from Boyd McDonald, one of her most ardent and articulate devotees. Saluting Grahame’s performance in In a Lonely Place (1950) in his essential 1985 compendium, Cruising...
Nov 25, 2016 — Did You See This? In celebration of TIFF’s ongoing series Imitations of Life: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Guy Maddin takes a look at the German master’s predilection for lush color palettes. In his latest TCM Diary for Film...
Nov 25, 2016 — In his deeply personal third feature, Noah Baumbach charts a family’s dissolution against the backdrop of 1980s literary Brooklyn.
Essays
Nov 22, 2016 — The result of a notoriously troubled production, Marlon Brando’s unorthodox western presents a brooding vision of human futility.
Nov 21, 2016 — By turns hilarious and heartrending, The Squid and the Whale is one of Noah Baumbach’s most autobiographical works. Rooted in his experiences growing up in a hyperliterate household in 1980s Park Slope, this ensemble comedy captures the tempestuous dynamics between...
Short Takes
Nov 18, 2016 — Artists across all mediums have long been obsessed with the challenge of evoking dream states, but film—with its oneiric combinations of light and shadow, and its ability to manipulate time and space—has particularly uncanny access to our nighttime reveries. Whether...
On the Channel
Nov 18, 2016 — Tonight we salute the unique gifts of actor and monologue artist Spalding Gray, whose solo performance pieces inspired soaring flights of cinema like Jonathan Demme’s Swimming to Cambodia and the two Steven Soderbergh films that make up our double bill....
Nov 16, 2016 — The joy of new love collides with the anxieties of everyday life in Paul Thomas Anderson’s off-kilter foray into romantic comedy.