The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 21, 2022 — By centering an empowered Black hero, Gordon Parks reimagined the detective genre and exposed its racial politics.
Jan 31, 2022 — Movies are about looking, and no one involved in the making of a film is more directly responsible for the frames we look at than a cinematographer, or director of photography. Together with the director, the cinematographer shapes the visual...
Jan 25, 2022 — By repeatedly staging the death of the filmmaker’s father with tragicomic flair, Kirsten Johnson’s hybrid documentary grapples with the realities of dementia and finds grace.
Jan 12, 2022 — Gifted with the looks and suavity of a young Elvis, the “Wicked Game” crooner shares with David Lynch an obsession with 1950s Americana—and a knowledge of the darkness at its heart.
Nov 17, 2021 — Decades after Peter Lorre’s knife-toting creep Hans Beckert prowled the Berlin streets in search of little girls in Fritz Lang’s M (1931); after Robert Mitchum’s silver-tongued Harry Powell cut down all the “smooth and curly-haired things” he could get his...
The Daily
Nov 10, 2021 — Over time, the former child star learned to love his work.
Sep 30, 2021 — The Oscar-winning actor—whose one-hundredth birthday we’re celebrating on the Criterion Channel—embodied a mess of contradictions that have long been obscured by her reputation for unbending rectitude.
Sep 28, 2021 — Melvin Van Peebles’s feature debut riffs on the French New Wave to tell a love story that portrays interracial intimacy and unflinchingly confronts the distortions of racism.
The Daily
Sep 16, 2021 — For some, it’s “a relentless, propulsive chase movie,” while others find this first part to be “a turgid preamble with little payoff.”
Sep 7, 2021 — When Breathless opened in the U.S., the New York Times announced the arrival of “a hypnotically ugly new young man by the name of Jean-Paul Belmondo.”