The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Aug 31, 2015 — “When you’re writing a screenplay, it’s like you’re dreaming the film for yourself again and again and again until it becomes almost like a memory before you make it,” says writer and actor Greta Gerwig in a new interview in...
Essays
Dec 12, 2012 — Even with limited resources, Christopher Nolan proved a force to be reckoned with in his thrilling, auspicious debut.
Mar 28, 2011 — Topsy-Turvy is both an anomaly among the films of Mike Leigh and, contrary as it may seem, a Rosetta stone. On the one hand, it is Leigh’s only costume picture and only biopic—a far cry from the bittersweet, realistic films...
Essays
Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...
Nov 10, 2008 — The life and work of American writer and painter Manny Farber, one of the most celebrated and idiosyncratic voices in the history of film criticism, will be honored by New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center in a two-week festival—simply...
Jun 16, 2008 — Claude Sautet occupies a unique place in French cinema. Although he directed some of the biggest hits of the seventies and worked with some of the biggest stars, few critics considered him an “auteur” in his lifetime. Paradoxically, it was...
Essays
Jun 7, 1999 — From the moment of its first appearance, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959—where it won the Palme d’Or—it was clear that Black Orpheus was a very special film. Taking the ancient Greek myth of a youth who travels to...
On the Channel
Feb 12, 2018 — Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro shares heartfelt appreciations for eleven of his favorite films in the collection.
The Daily
Nov 19, 2019 — Contributors to RogerEbert.com and the A.V. Club as well as Time’s Stephanie Zacharek and more pick their favorite films of the decade.