The Criterion Collection
May 28, 2013 — Mike Leigh’s breakthrough is a funny film about serious things, and an emotional and slyly political take on consumer culture.
May 14, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s classic western is psychologically probing, magnificently shot, and fascinatingly ambiguous.
Essays
Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...
In Theaters
Oct 11, 2012 — Repertory PicksBAMcinématek in Brooklyn is looking back to the nineties for a celebration of the period in American and British independent cinema when a wide array of gay and lesbian artists built their own movement. The series Born in Flames:...
Essays
Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.
From 1961's groundbreaking Victim to trailblazing modern romances, these are the LGBTQ+ films out on Criterion.
Essays
May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...
Nov 15, 2011 — You make films to give people something, to transport them somewhere else, and it doesn’t matter if you transport them to a world of intuition or a world of the intellect.Krzysztof Kieślowski said that he did not care about cinema,...
Short Takes
Oct 26, 2011 — Piercing chamber drama though it may be, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers would seem an unlikely candidate for the theater, so quiet, vivid, and intimate is its story of a dying woman and the sisters who fail to offer her...
Essays
Aug 30, 2011 — A startling blend of fantasy and reality, Lindsay Anderson’s satirical tale of adolescent rebellion personifies the 1960s.