The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 12, 2026 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. The foundational myth of the American dream puts forth...
Sep 22, 2025 — The director of the documentary Celluloid Underground discusses his life as a curator, Iranian film culture, and the inherent ephemerality of cinema.
Sep 26, 2024 — The directors discuss their award-winning documentary Bad Press and their effort to invert the exploitative dynamics that have long existed between documentary filmmakers and Indigenous communities.
Apr 25, 2023 — In his second Palme d’Or–winning film, Ruben Östlund uses familiar reality-television tropes to stage a deeply unnerving spectacle of obscene wealth and class outrage.
Features
Aug 9, 2022 — An indie pioneer whose life was cut tragically short, the Texas filmmaker found grace in the tedium of repressive small-town existence.
Jun 28, 2022 — Part rom-com, part existential meditation, the final installment in Joachim Trier’s Oslo trilogy dignifies the fluctuating desires of a woman on the cusp of thirty.
Feb 17, 2022 — Here’s a sampling of early critical response to this year’s winners.
Oct 22, 2021 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. Americans have long been encouraged to buy into the...
Jul 3, 2020 — One Scene By 2008, Olivier Assayas was perhaps best known as a director of fraught, emotionally intense, experimentally structured thrillers such as Irma Vep (1996), demonlover (2002), and Boarding Gate (2007), so the contemplative quiet of the feature he released...
Nov 29, 2019 — Since its debut in 2003, the online film publication Reverse Shot has found playful and provocative ways of blurring the boundaries between presumed opposites. With their tradition of symposiums—collections of newly commissioned essays on various topics and questions in film...