The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.
Apr 23, 2009 — These profiles of the real-life Sada Abé and the actress who portrayed her in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses first appeared in Donald Richie’s 1987 book Different People: Pictures of Some Japanese, and can also be found...
Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...
Oct 24, 2005 — Mirroring changes in awareness, politics, and lifestyle occurring across the globe, the chanbara (or Japanese swordplay film) underwent a significant metamorphosis in the early 1960s, acquiring a decidedly more radical spirit. Seemingly without warning, groundbreaking cinematic styles from beyond the...
Sep 29, 2003 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his final energies to bringing the lost, gray years of postwar Germany back to life.
Jul 2, 2026 — I first met Courtney Love in 1994. I was twelve years old, and I felt ugly and confused pretty much all the time. I was slouching through the locker bay at Calle Mayor Middle School in Torrance, California, when I...
The Daily
Jun 2, 2026 — Gorin will discuss films he’s selected as well as his own work and his collaborations with Jean-Luc Godard.
The Daily
May 12, 2026 — Sorting through critics’ most-anticipated titles, catching up with interviews and profiles, and more.
Essays
Nov 18, 2025 — This tale of paranoia and romantic jealousy slyly combines the conventions of popular Mexican filmmaking with the surrealist sensibility that made its director, Luis Buñuel, a legendary figure in his native Spain.
Aug 25, 2025 — In such provocative delights as Jamón jamón and Golden Balls, one of Spain’s most original directors celebrates the sensual pleasures of food and sex while capturing the rapid changes his country experienced at the turn of the millennium.