The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 27, 2006 — Centered on the destruction wrought by unbridled female eros, Pandora’s Box would, in its shockingly modern, instinct-driven psychology, end up defining both its director and its star.
Jan 31, 2005 — Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel...
Oct 15, 2001 — The French director’s crime film conveys both the flow and the form of the prison experience.
Essays
May 15, 2000 — In René Clair’s ebullient early talkie, an unsentimental love of humanity permeates every frame.
Essays
Nov 22, 1999 — Grand Illusion is the masterpiece that earned Jean Renoir enormous acclaim in the United States, exciting the admiration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and running for 26 weeks in New York after its opening in September 1938. Banned in Italy...
Essays
Sep 25, 1995 — Noel Coward and David Lean’s drama is the Citizen Kane of war movies, as well as the precursor to Lean’s even more celebrated works.
Apr 23, 2026 — Julio Torres is a writer, director, and comedian from El Salvador. He is a two-time Peabody Award winner for HBO’s Los Espookys and Fantasmas, and earned four Emmy nominations for his work on Saturday Night Live. Torres made his feature...
Jul 22, 2026 — The filmmaker looks back on the experiences that have shaped his creative life, including his time in art school, his work as a graphic designer and music-video director, and his early interest in documentary cinema.
Sep 24, 2025 — Jacques Audiard’s Paris-set drama about small-time hoodlum with musical ambitions crystallized his identity as an artist with a high degree of confidence and control.
Apr 29, 2025 — A gritty look at New York City’s underground economy through the eyes of an immigrant street hustler, Sean Baker’s third feature film demonstrates his gift for combining hardscrabble social realism and mischievous humor.