The Criterion Collection
Sneak Peeks
Jul 1, 2015 — Beautiful and strange from beginning to end, Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a film like no other. It’s fairy tale, horror movie, and coming-of-age story all at once, like Alice in Wonderland with medieval and religious...
In Theaters
May 4, 2015 — Two decades after its original negatives were burned in a fire, Satyajit Ray’s breathtaking milestone of world cinema The Apu Trilogy (Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and Apur Sansar) is returning to theaters across the country, in a meticulously reconstructed new 4K...
Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.
Nov 25, 2014 — Features Director Michelangelo Antonioni made these famous remarks at the press conference following the May 1960 Cannes Film Festival premiere of L’avventura. They appear here in a translation published in the spring 1962 issue of the journal Film Culture. Today...
Oct 3, 2014 — Certain Blu-ray discs pressed at a replication facility that we used for a period in 2010 have become defective.
Essays
Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...
Dec 10, 2013 — In 1998, I interviewed Little Edie Beale, the surviving star of 1976’s Grey Gardens, one of the Maysles brothers’ numerous masterworks (Gimme Shelter, Meet Marlon Brando, and With Love from Truman are equal in technical and emotional innovation). Miss Beale,...
May 28, 2013 — Mike Leigh’s breakthrough is a funny film about serious things, and an emotional and slyly political take on consumer culture.
Production Notes
Apr 4, 2013 — 1. Director Robert Bresson originally titled his screenplay Aide-toi . . ., a reference to the French expression “Aide-toi et le ciel t’aidera” (“Heaven helps those who help themselves”). He ultimately decided instead to use the title Devigny’s journalistic account of his...
Short Takes
Oct 16, 2012 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí is one of the most sensual films ever made—and there are hardly any people in it. In this poetic documentary—available to stream for free this week on Hulu as part of our Cityscapes festival—the Japanese avant-gardist responsible for the...