The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 12, 2026 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. The foundational myth of the American dream puts forth...
The Daily
Oct 2, 2020 — This wild week we’re celebrating William Greaves, watching Denis Lavant dance, and listening to Léonce-Henry Burel’s juicy stories about Robert Bresson.
The Daily
Jan 21, 2022 — Welles, Hitchcock, Malick, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Jonas Mekas appear between the covers this month.
Sep 11, 2018 — There is a brief, nearly throwaway scene early in Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994) that testifies to the transcultural power of rock and roll. In an apartment outside Paris in 1972, we see two teenage brothers wrestling over a portable...
The Daily
Oct 6, 2017 — Back when Projections was still called “Views from the Avant-Garde,” the New York Film Festival described its program as a “yearly touchstone for experimental film.” Now neither of those terms—“avant-garde” and “experimental”—are quite broad enough to encompass all that goes...
Jun 1, 2016 — With Wrong Move, Wim Wenders made “a movie about the impossibility of moviemaking, a road movie about the uselessness of travel, a literary film about the impossibility of communication.”
Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.
Essays
Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.
Jul 25, 2017 — Albert Brooks brings the gift for comic deconstruction he honed in his stand-up career to this uproarious satire of baby boomer values.
Jul 3, 2019 — Punk has been tamed, punk has been neutered, punk has been domesticated. The album The Stooges is fifty years old this August, and the music of omnidirectional bile and antiauthoritarianism that it anticipated has been museumified, the subject of a...