The Criterion Collection
Feb 2, 2017 — In her just-released Sundance hit The Lure, Agnieszka Smoczyńska evokes both the decadence and decrepitude of 1980s Poland through the adventures of Silver and Gold, two man-eating mermaid sisters who decide to go terrestrial and soon become a nightclub singing...
Sneak Peeks
Jan 23, 2017 — One of the most striking elements of Something Wild, Jack Garfein’s psychologically complex examination of trauma and attachment, is the 1960s New York City its distressed characters inhabit. Shot by Eugen Schüfftan, an Oscar-winning German cinematographer renowned for the special-effects...
Sneak Peeks
Dec 16, 2016 — Earlier this week, we released our edition of John Huston’s 1950 heist film The Asphalt Jungle, whose combination of meticulous plotting and sympathetic characterization remains a blueprint for the genre. Set amid the smoky streets of an unnamed city in...
Essays
Nov 22, 2016 — The result of a notoriously troubled production, Marlon Brando’s unorthodox western presents a brooding vision of human futility.
On the Channel
Nov 3, 2016 — Our first Friday Night Double Feature on the Criterion Channel pairs two chilling serial-killer films: Fritz Lang’s M and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs.
Features
Oct 31, 2016 — In her latest column, critic Imogen Sara Smith explores landmark moments in the intersection of noir and the western, including Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks.
Sep 20, 2016 — Cloaked in chiaroscuro and innuendo, this stylistically innovative creature feature leaves its greatest horrors to the imagination.
Features
Sep 19, 2016 — If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop.
Features
Aug 14, 2016 — While considered to lie outside the highly policed boundaries of film noir, films like Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind and Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes nevertheless share many of noir’s stylistic and thematic tropes.
Jul 12, 2016 — Herk Harvey’s influential, low-budget horror classic Carnival of Souls is an eerie exploration of the mutability of place and the purgatorial state of dreaming.