The Criterion Collection
May 13, 2010 — Samuel Beam is an American singer-songwriter (and former film studies professor!) better known by the stage name Iron and Wine. His last album was 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog, and a follow-up is in the works. When selecting his top ten...
May 13, 2009 — It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Chris Marker is a devoted inhabitant of the virtual world Second Life. After all, one could call the playful French filmmaker and multimedia artist’s kitty—and alter ego—Guillaume-en-Egypt a trailblazing avatar (when asked...
Apr 16, 2009 — Next week, we release a definitive, three-disc set of the short documentaries of Jean Painlevé (1902–89), the pioneering French scientist-educator-filmmaker (and sometime Dadaist) whose mesmerizing studies of marine life, especially, have been attracting wide audiences and new fans for decades...
Mar 30, 2009 — You can add James Franco to the list of Criterion’s most ardent fans. This month, the actor, seen left in a photo recalling My Own Private Idaho, taken by Gus Van Sant in Oregon in fall 2008, has contributed to...
Mar 27, 2009 — Thanks to IFC Daily’s David Hudson for tipping us off to a couple of top-notch articles this week marking the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave. That’s right, it was fifty years ago, in May to be precise, that...
Feb 5, 2009 — “Around the time that the KKK rode to victory in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Al Jolson applied burned cork to his face in The Jazz Singer (1927), and scores of African-American actors bowed, scraped, shucked, and jived in...
Dec 30, 2008 — It’s the last day of 2008, and all the balloting is finally done. Here’s a rundown of how Criterion rated in the best DVDs of the year polls: The Sight & Sound list included Criterion’s “gripping morality tale” Death of...
Dec 16, 2008 — More than a year ago, Peter and I were in the midst of discussions about how we wanted to launch the Criterion cinematheque. Over time, those discussions expanded to include every department at Criterion. We wanted to have a single...
Dec 7, 2008 — Fitting as a monument to such a long, influential, multimedia career, the publisher Taschen has released the mammoth The Ingmar Bergman Archives, a 592-page, fifteen-pound chronicle of the Swedish filmmaker’s career in film, theater, and television (“Just don’t pick up...
Nov 20, 2008 — David Hudson lives in Berlin and translated screenplays until his blog, GreenCine Daily, swallowed him whole. “It’s awfully daunting to scan a list of over four hundred titles—especially these four hundred–plus titles—and force yourself to pick out ten. I started...