The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 23, 2017 — In one of the first major films to confront the contemporary refugee crisis in Europe, Jacques Audiard brings a genre-busting approach to an explosive subject.
On the Channel
Nov 17, 2016 — Despite its reputation as a popcorn genre, science fiction has been an exciting frontier for some of cinema’s most innovative and ambitious masters. For Auteurs in Space, a Criterion Channel series we just premiered today, we’ve gathered a lineup of...
Jun 17, 2014 — The brutal lessons of Vietnam remained in America’s national consciousness for a generation. September 11 gave us collective amnesia, and they’ve had to be learned again.
Feb 28, 2014 — The Great Beauty, which is up for best foreign-language film at Sunday’s Academy Awards, feels at times like a glorious throwback to a time when art-house cinema reigned. Feeling nostalgic for that era, when films by the great directors of world...
Short Takes
Mar 5, 2013 — Today we tip our hats to the debonair, mischievous Rex Harrison, born on March 5, 1908. Perhaps remembered best for his role as the arrogant impresario Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, the 1964 movie musical version of Pygmalion, Harrison...
Short Takes
Mar 19, 2012 — Some people have called us “film school in a box,” but this is the real deal. The essential film school introductory textbook, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s Film Art: An Introduction, is coming out in its tenth edition in the summer,...
Essays
Mar 10, 2009 — Akira Kurosawa made Dodes’ka-den (1970) during the most crisis-laden period of his career. He had just spent two years embroiled in an ill-fated venture with the Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox to direct the Japanese segments of the World War...
"Life caught unawares," that's how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov defined the principle and art of documentary in the thirties. Yet the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it is too simple to call it the...
Delicately riding the line between pulp and art, these films refuse to be marginalized, lower budgets and lack of Hollywood gloss be damned.
Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.