The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 4, 2018 — What do we mean when we say a narrative film is poetic? The answer lies in this visionary western from director Jim Jarmusch.
Dec 1, 2006 — We left St-Michel feeling uplifted and took a nice stroll south, past the Closerie des Lilas, the restaurant made famous by Hemingway, and through the Luxembourg gardens, where a film crew was laying dolly tracks and fitting counterweights on a...
Essays
Sep 30, 2020 — Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project No. 3 Pixote (1980), subtitled A lei do mais fraco (The Law of the Weakest), a hard-hitting tale of urban street children and their daily battle for survival in brutal conditions, was the Argentine-born Brazilian...
Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...
Feb 12, 2013 — The Dardenne brothers return to the streets of Seraing for a typically humane and suspenseful story of personal redemption.
Jun 30, 2026 — The distinction between social and political cinema is not always clear. The former category, which focuses on realistic portrayals of the everyday lives and struggles of the working class, generally includes the films of Italian neorealism and British social realism,...
Jan 22, 2026 — A singular achievement in Arab film history, Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina’s sweeping political epic is a memorial to the lives lost in the struggle for Algerian independence.
Nov 12, 2025 — In this Sundance-award-winning exploration of war and memory, writer Cathy Linh Che shines a spotlight on her parents, who were Vietnamese refugees living in the Philippines when they were cast as extras in Apocalypse Now.
Aug 19, 2025 — In his fifth and sixth feature films, Edward Yang sought to uncover what was hidden in Taipei society, often in plain sight, looking past the city’s shiny skyline to the fault lines beneath the surface.
The Daily
Jan 14, 2025 — There’s a Delphine Seyrig retrospective on in New York and another will open at the Harvard Film Archive on Friday.