The Criterion Collection
Oct 4, 2011 — Masaki Kobayashi rejects the notion of individual submission to the group, condemning the hierarchical structures that pervaded Japanese political and social life in the 1950s and 1960s.
Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.
Essays
Jul 21, 2008 — A dreamy alternative to the standard notion of horror, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s phantasmal film reimagined the figure of the vampire.
Essays
Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.
Essays
Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first feature is the kind of uncanny, equivocally realist movie you might hope to duck into in a strange city, stumbling across it in a low-rent theater while escaping a bad date or a debt collector.
Feb 13, 2006 — John Ford’s biographical drama portrays an imaginary antebellum America with relaxed humor and effortless nostalgic charm while sustaining an underlying note of somber apprehension.
Essays
Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s dynamic, intricately madcap movie is a multitoned send-up of samurai film lore.
Essays
Jul 14, 2026 — In May of 1962, when Martin Ritt arrived in the Texas Panhandle town of Claude to begin filming Hud, he may have sensed that his career was about to change. Hud would be Ritt’s ninth feature but his first personal...
Apr 28, 2026 — In April 1992, John Singleton was en route to the set of his second film when he heard the verdict on the radio. A predominantly white jury had acquitted four police officers who, a year earlier, had been caught on...
Jul 22, 2025 — An era-defining reckoning with the sexual revolution, Mike Nichols’s controversial drama develops a rigorous form for analyzing what we have recently come to call “toxic masculinity.”