The Criterion Collection
Dec 4, 2006 — William Greaves’s masterpiece uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary.
Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...
Essays
Oct 19, 1998 — Jean-Luc Godard’s stripped-down science-fiction drama depicts a computer-controlled society at war with artists, thinkers, and lovers.
Essays
Oct 12, 1998 — Inspired by the stranger-than-fiction true story of identical twin gynecologists, David Cronenberg’s psychological thriller is a melancholic meditation on our very existence.
The legendary Iranian filmmaker explored the boundaries between reality and fiction, the complexities of childhood, and the beauty of his country’s landscapes.
The director of I’m Still Here shares why Andrei Rublev and Stranger Than Paradise consistently renew his faith in cinema, talks about the unique mix of documentary and fiction in Memories of Underdevelopment, and praises how Garrett Bradley’s Time shows...
This British auteur pushed the boundaries of narrative form with his dark psychological dramas and mind-bending reinventions of horror and science fiction.
The writer and director of The Two Faces of a Bamiléké Woman and Mambar Pierrette talks about being inspired by Ousmane Sembène and shares how Abbas Kiarostami’s films freed her to blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction.
Feb 24, 2026 — For this existential noir, Joel and Ethan Coen drew inspiration from crime-fiction master James M. Cain’s lean, hard-boiled style and interest in the quotidian world of work.
Essays
Jan 21, 2025 — In his first Hollywood film, British director Stephen Frears dives into the nihilistic world of Jim Thompson’s fiction, delivering an adaptation profoundly attuned to the novelist’s sense of ineluctable suffering.