The Criterion Collection
Essays
Aug 24, 2010 — I n a photograph of Josef von Sternberg from 1937, he looks like a character from one of his own films: a turbaned magus with elegantly trimmed beard and mustache, holding a cigarette as he gazes out obliquely, with the...
Nov 26, 2018 — Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.
Jan 20, 2018 — We begin with April Wolfe, writing for Film Comment and introducing us to Maxim Pozdorovkin and Our New President, which “tells a thrilling, scary, mind-bending, and often-hilarious story of Russian propaganda’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, constructed almost...
Essays
Aug 14, 2012 — The Dardennes threw down the gauntlet for a new type of unadorned dramatic storytelling with their breakthrough tale of a working-class boy’s fraught coming-of-age.
Features
Oct 4, 2023 — Night has fallen in London, but the streets still teem with people. Through a second-story window, we watch as an elderly Jewish man who lives over a shop is stabbed to death and his rooms are set on fire. We...
Apr 12, 2011 — With his 1970 gangster epic Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.
On the Channel
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.
Aug 23, 2018 — The director of Computer Chess and Support the Girls finds in John Cassavetes a surrealist whose weirdest set pieces could make David Lynch blush.
Jun 17, 2013 — The silent legend practices slapstick with clockwork precision in his most iconic, astonishing comedy.
The Daily
Oct 7, 2019 — Critics respond to the New York Film Festival’s selection of new moving image art.