The Criterion Collection
On the Channel
Aug 31, 2020 — Documentaries lead the charge this month on the Criterion Channel, with a wide-ranging offering of nonfiction films as formally imaginative and emotionally riveting as any scripted drama.
On the Channel
Jul 30, 2020 — Channel Calendars Stuck at home this summer? Don’t let that get you down—our Bad Vacations series makes the case for staying in and watching movies, cataloguing an array of holiday horrors ranging from existential ennui to full-throttle terror. That’s just...
Essays
Oct 24, 2019 — With deafening footfalls and an earsplitting roar, Gojira, known in the West as Godzilla, first thundered into Japan’s movie houses on November 3, 1954. Six and a half decades later, the monster presides over an international entertainment franchise, having starred...
Sep 30, 2019 — At first glance, Jean-Pierre Melville’s body of work might seem to display a schizophrenic split between two currents or tendencies. The first is in total symbiosis with the history of France and is rooted in the filmmaker’s own life, notably...
May 28, 2019 — It has taken me forty years to appreciate the audacity of Agnès Varda in writing and directing One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977). Not only did Varda make her subject the most crucial and vexed issue of the feminist movement, at that...
Dec 12, 2018 — Selection to the registry ensures that “these films will be preserved for all time.”
Nov 26, 2018 — Even as he chronicles the downfall of an American family, Orson Welles brings a sense of buoyancy to this grim saga through his virtuoso storytelling.
Aug 7, 2018 — Can creative genius flourish on the federal dime? Animator Norman McLaren’s remarkably innovative, government-funded films suggest it can.
On the Channel
May 20, 2018 — A lifelong movie collector remembers the thrill of discovering the granddaddy of all monsters on Super 8.
Apr 13, 2018 — Soviet filmmaker Sergei Parajanov explored his Transcaucasian roots in this visually spectacular and wonderfully strange ode to the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova.