The Criterion Collection
Features
Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...
Essays
May 8, 2018 — In his uncharacteristic final masterpiece, the great Hollywood melodramatist Frank Borzage approaches the shadowy violence of film noir with his unique brand of romanticism.
Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.
Aug 18, 2003 — One of the Swedish director’s most representative works, this drama’s portentousness, banked intensity, and recondite symbolism come near to embodying the popular stereotype of the Bergmanesque.
Essays
Feb 1, 1988 — Charles Laughton’s classic has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it also mixes rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good...
Features
Aug 27, 2026 — The illuminating 1982 documentary I Heard It Through the Grapevine follows the celebrated author on a journey through the American South, as he attempts to reckon with the legacy and losses of the civil rights movement.
Aug 25, 2026 — James Gray’s extraordinary debut feature is a painstakingly distilled tale of crime and family dysfunction, captured with a merciless gaze and a sharp attention to idiosyncratic detail.
The Daily
Jul 13, 2026 — Jurors have honored films from Myanmar, Denmark, Slovakia, Japan, and Greece.
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,...