The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Sep 13, 2012 — Horror fans might assume that director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies wrote the book on cursed bibles of the damned. But years earlier, in 1967, The Equinox . . . A Journey into the Supernatural, one of the films in this week’s...
Essays
Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.
Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...
Mar 30, 2026 — Suffused with visual beauty and moments of magical realism, Jess X. Snow’s queer diasporic cinema invites us to imagine new possibilities for freedom, transformation, and intergenerational healing.
Apr 25, 2023 — Steve McQueen’s monumental, five-film portrait of London’s West Indian community is a howl of endorsement for political resistance and a vivid indictment of institutional malaise.
Jul 14, 2020 — Bruce Lee seemed born to be on-screen. At three months old, he appeared as an infant in a Hong Kong movie called Golden Gate Girl (1941). After he died suddenly of cerebral edema in 1973 at the age of thirty-two,...
Jul 3, 2020 — As The War of the Worlds is essentially a cautionary tale, each generation gets its own adaptation of H. G. Wells’s classic account of extraterrestrial invasion—one of the several seminal science-fiction novels, also including The Time Machine (1895) and The...
Aug 10, 2017 — “Stylish swagger goes full-tilt boogie in Let the Corpses Tan (Laissez bronzer les cadavres), the latest delirious exercise in lovingly retro pastiche from Brussels-based writer-directors Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani,” begins Neil Young in the Hollywood Reporter. “Having amassed a...
May 25, 2010 — In the films of Stan Brakhage, the viewer’s role must be reimagined: from a passive receiver to one who meets the film halfway, actively plumbing the depths of its imagery and the various themes and ideas suggested by its subject...
Jul 14, 2026 — One of the funniest and most affecting scenes in 1970s Hollywood cinema is also one of the most quietly radical—no small feat in a decade of movies marked by wiggy experimentation, explosions of brutal and cathartic violence, and shaggy new...