The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...
Feb 5, 2013 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s most experimental film is a resplendent, kabuki-inspired, folk-derived drama about mortality.
Dec 18, 2012 — One Scene Every time I watch Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, I am stunned that a film could be so full. Here is this thing stuffed with detail, design, behavior, emotion, surprise, and skill. Like Fanny and Alexander and...
Oct 16, 2012 — After breaking out with Maria Full of Grace, filmmaker Joshua Marston visited a strange new land with persistent and deadly traditions.
Short Takes
Oct 4, 2012 — Louis Malle is remembered primarily as a fiction filmmaker, but he had a parallel career as a documentarian. In fact, he got his start in nonfiction: when he was just twenty-three years old, Malle was given the opportunity to collaborate...
Sep 26, 2012 — Countercultural icons Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov makes square subversive in Bartel’s cult classic.
Sep 18, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...
Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.
Aug 29, 2012 — With humor and melancholy, Franc Roddam’s coming-of-age drama, based on the Who’s iconic album, shows us a g-g-generation on the edge.
Aug 21, 2012 — Andrew Haigh’s boy-meets-boy story reminds us that the biggest pleasures of falling in love come from the little moments of connection.