The Goumbé of the Young Revelers

Aug 25, 2015 — Bill Hader and Fred Armisen’s hilarious new IFC Channel show Documentary Now! started last week, and already we can’t get enough. Of course, it helps that the crackerjack comedy team (one of whom is an avowed Criterion fanatic) launched the...

Aug 20, 2015 — You may recognize Jason Polan’s often wacky, always charming drawings from our newsletter emails. But the artist, whose illustrations have also been published in the New Yorker, Metropolis, and the New York Times, has his sights set on more than...

Aug 20, 2015 — Repertory PicksIn 1979, Roman Polanski broke out of the more claustrophobic spaces of his early thrillers like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Tenant with Tess, an exquisitely detailed adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic book Tess of the d’Urbervilles, proving his...

Jul 27, 2015 — When Hiroshima mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais and written by Marguerite Duras, was released in 1959, it sent shock waves through the film world. It was clear, even from its first frames, that this modernist masterpiece was inventing a...

Jul 15, 2015 — The British director Mike Leigh (Life Is Sweet, Naked) is a major fan of the Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell, and especially his debut feature, Here Is Your Life. In this excerpt from Leigh’s introduction to Here Is Your Life on...

Jun 29, 2015 — The most famous scene in Five Easy Pieces—and perhaps one of the most fondly recalled moments of all of the New American Cinema of the early seventies—is the diner confrontation between Jack Nicholson’s volatile Bobby Dupea and a strict waitress....

May 26, 2015 — We were saddened to learn of the passing yesterday of Mary Ellen Mark, a great, world-renowned American photographer and a wonderful friend to Criterion. In honor of her extraordinary career, we thought we‘d share an excerpt from a recent interview...

May 21, 2015 — Repertory PicksWhen cinematographic genius Max Ophuls made his first Technicolor, CinemaScope extravaganza (also, sadly, his last, due to his death), he pulled out all the stops. Lola Montès, his ravishing biopic of the notorious nineteenth-century courtesan, is the kind of...

Apr 28, 2015 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le silence de la mer is undoubtedly one of the most assured film debuts of all time; an adaptation of an underground novel by Jean Bruller, written (under the pseudonym Vercors) during the Nazi occupation of France, the...

Feb 18, 2015 — Don’t Look Now is many things: terrifying, poignant, mysterious, sexy, tragic. That all these disparate qualities are woven together so seamlessly is partly a miracle of cutting, so one must give proper credit to the film’s editor, Graeme Clifford. In...