The Criterion Collection
Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...
Feb 13, 2006 — John Ford’s biographical drama portrays an imaginary antebellum America with relaxed humor and effortless nostalgic charm while sustaining an underlying note of somber apprehension.
Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...
Sep 24, 2024 — Emerging out of the mass death, cultural ferment, and semiotic tumult of the 1990s, this trio of deliriously profane films glares at American youth culture and gives zero shits if it looks back.
Jul 6, 2021 — Howard Hawks’s madcap battle of the sexes is a reminder of how necessary and sneakily profound silliness can be.
Essays
Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.
The Daily
Jul 17, 2026 — Some early reviews raise a few objections, but for the most part, Nolan is wowing critics with his grandest vision yet.
Feb 8, 2022 — A Prohibition-era gangster saga, the Coen brothers’ third feature is an enigmatic fable of violence, loyalty, and existential unease.
Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...
On the Channel
Jun 28, 2021 — Next month brings a twenty-seven-film spotlight on the neonoir thrillers of the post-studio-system era, a survey of art-house animation from around the world, and more.