The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...
The Daily
Jan 14, 2019 — MoMA’s festival of film preservation features Lubitsch, Akerman, Murnau, Lupino, and an eclectic array of rediscoveries.
Essays
Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...
The Daily
Nov 6, 2023 — Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography begins its theatrical run across North America.
Dec 13, 2016 — John Huston’s meticulously calibrated crime film combines nail-biting suspense with a mood of Chekhovian regret.
Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...
Essays
Oct 31, 1988 — This ingenious and entertaining crime thriller marks what its director Stanley Kubrick would like to think of as the real beginning of his career.
The Daily
Nov 14, 2025 — This week: Buñuel revivals, the Rock Hudson centenary, and Mishima’s Japanese premiere.
Jun 10, 2024 — The Canadian filmmaker and artist reflects on his award-winning 1996 breakthrough, a work of voluptuous style and fierce political commitment that remains a landmark of New Queer Cinema.
Features
May 4, 2020 — “You’ve never seen prairie grass with the wind leaning on it, have you, Diz?”Jean Arthur asks this poetic, expressively peculiar question of Thomas Mitchell in Frank Capra’s 1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and we understand her yearning for truth...