The Criterion Collection
Features
Feb 28, 2011 — In 1969, director Alexander Mackendrick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be...
Feb 2, 2022 — Released in 1972, Perry Henzell’s thrilling drama The Harder They Come, starring real-life reggae icon Jimmy Cliff as singer-turned-outlaw Ivanhoe Martin, was among the first films to prominently feature reggae music both as subject matter and on its soundtrack. The...
The Daily
Sep 28, 2017 — “Every year around this time,” New York Film Festival director Kent Jones tells poet Peter Gizzi in BOMB, “I do a few interviews, and this question always comes up: what themes did you pursue? My answer is always the same:...
The Daily
Apr 20, 2018 — Krzysztof Zanussi is currently in post-production on Ether, “a psychological drama with a Faust-inspired motive, set at the beginning of the 20th Century in Galicia, about a military doctor experimenting with science in order to get power over people,” reports...
Sep 5, 2017 — Frederick Wiseman “is 87 now,” as Tom Charity notes in the new issue of Cinema Scope. “It may be a little presumptuous to suggest he’s reaching for a summation, but it is sure that he’s only making the films he...
Features
May 7, 2015 — Movie comedies about moviemaking through the decades
The Daily
Apr 3, 2020 — Conversations with Frederick Wiseman and Quentin Tarantino and rediscoveries of forgotten critics and an Arab filmmaker are among this week’s highlights.
Jul 22, 2025 — An era-defining reckoning with the sexual revolution, Mike Nichols’s controversial drama develops a rigorous form for analyzing what we have recently come to call “toxic masculinity.”
Short Takes
May 24, 2016 — “I always thought of musicians as being the saints of our time,” says documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker in a recent interview for the New York Times on the subject of his 1967 vérité portrait of Bob Dylan Dont Look...
Essays
Feb 15, 2012 — Comedy evolves. We long ago bid adieu to the physical acrobatics of Buster Keaton, the wisecracks of Bob Hope, the witty repartee of Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. The now-reigning comedy of embarrassment, seen in the films of Judd Apatow...