The Criterion Collection
Jun 19, 2006 — This essay originally appeared in the fanzine PHOTON (issue #22), in 1972. Stop-motion animation has been attracting a growing number of enthusiasts for about the last ten years, and though it seems the majority of these people must out of...
Essays
May 17, 2004 — Banned by the Third Reich before it was even released, Fritz Lang’s denunciation of Nazi Germany is a compellingly contemporary image of terrorism in an age of universal conspiracy and advanced technology.
Jan 11, 1999 — This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.
Sep 13, 2004 — About a year and a half ago, a friend and I found ourselves exiled to a cold Midwestern city, where we spent most of our time missing the lazy Texas college town that shaped our idea of the good life....
Nov 22, 2022 — Spike Lee’s transcendent portrait of an American hero is an urgent call for the nation to live up to everything it claims to be.
The Daily
Jan 3, 2019 — We look ahead to films by Martin Scorsese, Greta Gerwig, Paul Verhoeven, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and dozens more.
May 27, 2015 — Costa-Gavras’s political drama sheds disturbing light on the violent methods used by governments to maintain order.
Essays
Jan 21, 2008 — While Agnès Varda was prescient in picking up on the new social phenomenon of France’s young female drifters, she also anticipated the culture of extreme individualism that has come to dominate Western society since the 1980s.
The Daily
Apr 17, 2026 — So many Hamlets! Plus Radley Metzger, Marco Bellocchio, and Tilda Swinton and Orbital.
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...