The Criterion Collection
Features
Apr 4, 2016 — Ray Dolby did not match the conventional image of an eccentric inventor, nor that of a business mogul. But his name now represents a benchmark by which the recording of sound and its playback on disc and in movie theaters...
Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.
Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.
Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.
Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.
Dec 29, 2015 — Kitchen Conversations“I almost have the impression that films come by themselves and you’re like a slave to them—one of them decides to go for it, and you run after it,” said director Deniz Gamze Ergüven when she and her eight-month-old...
Short Takes
Dec 14, 2015 — In the early 1960s, Agnès Varda traveled to Cuba to make the documentary Salut les Cubains (1963). Varda’s twenty-eight-minute film, composed almost entirely of photographs that captured Cuba’s vibrant postrevolutionary culture, was inspired by two of Chris Marker’s films—Varda took...
Nov 4, 2015 — Linklater circa 1990 In 1985, six years before the release of Slacker, Richard Linklater's iconic portrait of a generation, the Texan filmmaker founded the Austin Film Society. The group began as a small band of cinephiles eager to see classic,...
Interviews
Oct 30, 2015 — The following interview was originally published in the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews included in the book were conducted by Rodley between 1993 and 2005. For Criterion’s release of Mulholland Dr.,...
Oct 20, 2015 — Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien is back with an awe-inspiring martial-arts epic.