Life Is Life

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...

Sep 16, 2018 — Olivier Assayas revived the spirit of the 1970s in one of cinema’s most evocative party sequences, which serves as the centerpiece of his acclaimed 1994 film.

Dec 19, 2017 — Reese Witherspoon looks back on how she perfected the details of her performance as a high-school overachiever in Alexander Payne’s Election.

Mar 1, 2017 — The restoration teams at Warner Bros. and Criterion explain how they captured the silken texture of the nitrate print of Michael Curtiz’s classic noir melodrama.

Jan 10, 2017 — Mass culture is the subject of both celebration and critique in our latest Short + Feature, premiering today on the Criterion Channel. This week’s program highlights two French films that satirize the ubiquity of consumerism: Jean Luc Godard’s inventively free-form...

Oct 8, 2024 — An otherworldly exploration of the realm between life and death, this horror masterpiece transcends its genre with its poetic, often unsettling use of fragmentation and discontinuity.

Nov 21, 2022 — Straub and his life and filmmaking partner Danièle Huillet have been described as “cinema’s conscience.”

Jul 1, 2022 — Both crowd-pleasing and gleefully subversive, Blake Edwards’s 1982 hit Victor/Victoria remains one of the few Hollywood musicals that explicitly depicts queer life.

Jun 21, 2019 — The French iconoclast explains how his background in industrial filmmaking helped him bring life to abstract ideas about the human condition.

Jan 10, 2018 — The director of the war masterpiece Come and See got his start lampooning social conformity in 1960s Soviet life. Two of his early-career gems are now available on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck.