The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki's penultimate film for Nikkatsu is a subversively funny account of the making of a model fascist.
Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...
Aug 20, 2001 — Before Lars von Trier, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson there was Carl Th. Dreyer. The first great film artist to pursue the ineffable in cinema, Dreyer gave depth to what early silent filmmakers innately understood yet took...
Essays
Jan 29, 2001 — In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s drama, the characters abandon their twin faiths, in God and the British Empire, and turn themselves over to more ancient and dangerous powers.
Essays
Jun 3, 1991 — Robert Montgomery stars in the Oscar-nominated role of Joe Pendleton, a lug of a boxer accidentally spirited off to heaven before his time, while Claude Rains is the title character whose job it is to find a way for Pendleton...
Essays
Jun 16, 2026 — The debut in 1998 of Lisa Cholodenko’s first feature film, High Art, was a triumph. The intense mastery of its form and the freshness of its narrative created waves of excitement—from the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Waldo...
May 19, 2026 — Elevator doors open onto a warehouse floor bathed in red light, high above downtown Manhattan in early May 2024. Exposed concrete and visible ductwork frame a room where artists in green aprons, cosplaying as waiters, circulate among guests in suits...
Sep 10, 2024 — Andrew Haigh explores loss and queer loneliness in this exquisite, twilit tangle of lives and loves separated by space, time, and personal defenses.
Jul 13, 2022 — Stylistically informed by film noir, Martin Scorsese’s searing drama plumbs male violence and rage through a boxing champ’s self-destruction.
Jul 13, 2021 — Miles: I just sold a building on the Lower East Side and tripled my money Molly: There’s a lot of that happening these days. Released the year before Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Working Girls, a film about sex work, is a sharper by far...