The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 22, 2011 — Andrea Arnold seemed to emerge out of nowhere with Red Road (2006), her revelatory, shrewdly observed debut feature about voyeurism and sexual revenge. That film won Arnold multiple awards, and she had already earned an Oscar for her short Wasp...
Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...
Sep 28, 2022 — This melodrama, made by André de Toth in his native Hungary, anticipates the unease of the director’s postwar Hollywood films with an array of radical stylistic choices and jarring visual tensions.
Apr 28, 2026 — As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw...
Dec 22, 2025 — The critic and curator talks about working on a program of films by trailblazing Black women directors, which opened at London’s BFI Southbank this year and is now playing on the Criterion Channel.
Dec 13, 2022 — A pioneering feminist artist drawn to universal themes, the Swedish director mined the complexity and humor of human behavior in films that courted controversy and cultivated a sense of detachment.
Essays
Sep 28, 2021 — The first Black-directed movie musical of the modern film era, Melvin Van Peebles’s drama illuminates the cultural and political concerns of working-class Black people with delight and fancy.
The Daily
Mar 4, 2019 — Working with Demy, Varda, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, and Pialat, the producer was a formidable force in French cinema.
May 1, 2018 — Working within the strict rules and tight budget of a commissioned television project, one of France’s finest contemporary directors made an artistic breakthrough that would go on to define his career.
Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.