The Criterion Collection
Sneak Peeks
Dec 12, 2012 — Some directors learn their craft in school. Others acquire skills on the job. Christopher Nolan, who never studied film, seems to just have cinema in his blood. In this clip from a new interview on our special edition release of...
Sep 27, 2011 — Internationally, Victor Sjöström is best known for his performance as Professor Isak Borg in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). But behind that unforgettable face of old age is a younger man, a leading actor who was also the greatest Swedish...
Essays
Aug 18, 2003 — Ingmar Bergman’s chamber film is his most concentrated inquiry into the significance of religion, and of Lutheranism specifically.
Essays
Oct 18, 1994 — Val Lewton’s cinematic diamond-in-the-rough has been recognized for decades as a definitive chiller, but it was conceived as a title, with no story or notion in mind, and as a way of generating cash for RKO.
Feb 17, 2023 — Born and raised far from the centers of power in the movie industry, writer-director Glen Pitre began his career in the 1980s as a DIY filmmaker, showing his homemade productions to audiences in his native Louisiana. But when a powerful...
Essays
Nov 10, 2020 — In the half-light of the opening shot of Girlfriends, a woman asks, “What are you doing?” and another responds, “Go back to sleep.” You could dismiss this as a bit of passing dialogue—or you could see in it a larger...
Apr 19, 2019 — Performances No other comedian could milk a pause for a laugh quite the way Jack Benny could on his radio program, which lasted from 1932 to 1955 and turned him into an American institution. (He also did a TV show...
Feb 17, 2015 — It was never, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s intention that An Autumn Afternoon (1962) should be the final film of his thirty-five-year career as a writer-director. Indeed, before he died on his sixtieth birthday, in December 1963, he had made notes...
Aug 28, 2006 — Pietro Germi’s brilliant satire skewers Italian society’s devotion to appearances and its cultlike obsession with gossip and honor.
Essays
Jan 5, 2004 — One of the most original—and hilarious—comedies ever made, M. Hulot’s Holiday has delighted and disarmed moviegoers the world over since its first appearance in 1953. There’s little in the way of plot or dialogue to this French-made farce about a...