The Legend

Apr 14, 2020 — The late filmmaker admired by Jonas Mekas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and George Lucas cofounded Canyon Cinema and the San Francisco Cinematheque.

Jun 19, 2019 — To mark the anniversary, editors are highlighting some of her best work while critics and acolytes measure her impact.

Dec 20, 2017 — In her latest column, critic Imogen Sara Smith explains how cinematographer Henri Decaë brought a risk-taking spirit and seductive allure to some of the most iconic French crime films.

Nov 15, 2016 — This week’s Short + Feature program on the Criterion Channel pairs D.A. Pennebaker’s three-minute experimental Daybreak Express and Ronald Neame’s feature comedy The Horse’s Mouth.

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.

Mar 25, 2014 — Silent comedy superstar Harold Lloyd played big dreamers; few were more determined to succeed than the college football player Harold Lamb.

Nov 30, 2009 — The following essay was originally written for Criterion’s website in 2005, on the occasion of the DVD release of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. We have posted it here to coincide with BFI Southbank’s ongoing Hein Heckroth exhibition...

Aug 25, 2026 — In her second film, Oscar-winning documentarian Barbara Kopple captures the anguish and perils of disunity in the labor movement and the corrosion of union power during the Reagan era.

Jun 9, 2026 — Over the course of four decades, the great Mauritanian French filmmaker Med Hondo created a stylistically diverse, politically trenchant body of work that frequently tapped into his own Pan-African roots and explored the existential and material stresses of Black people...

Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.