The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 27, 2018 — With The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles created a model of period filmmaking, lightly deploying historical signifiers while focusing on the haunting power of his actors’ faces.
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.
Nov 19, 2018 — The great German director reflects on her first experience with Ingmar Bergman’s classic meditation on mortality, a film that opened her eyes to the possibilities of cinema.
Visual Analysis
Jul 31, 2018 — The award-winning director of The Rider explores the deep respect for nature and subjective human experience in Terrence Malick’s masterful vision of early seventeenth-century America.
Visual Analysis
Nov 29, 2016 — In the first installment of our new video series Under the Influence, the Moonlight director waxes rhapsodic about Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love.
Sep 28, 2026 — With their mix of comedy, ecstasy, and aesthetic strangeness, the French auteur’s first three features grant us access to psychic states that we might not otherwise be able to enter.
Sep 23, 2026 — Kleber Mendonça Filho explores the elisions of history and memory in this splendidly polymorphous thriller about a man on the run in 1977 Brazil.
Essays
Aug 25, 2026 — The pioneering husband-and-wife duo transformed the field of Japanese nonfiction cinema with their portraits of spectacular, edgy personalities and collectives under duress.
Essays
Mar 31, 2026 — Violently nihilistic, simultaneously energizing and crushing, Tsui Hark’s remake of the martial-arts classic One-Armed Swordsman captures the zeitgeist of pre–1997 handover Hong Kong.
Feb 24, 2026 — For this existential noir, Joel and Ethan Coen drew inspiration from crime-fiction master James M. Cain’s lean, hard-boiled style and interest in the quotidian world of work.