The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 2, 2009 — Writing the screenplay with Suzanne Schiffman, I intended to do for the theater what I had done for the cinema in Day for Night: the chronicle of a troupe at work, within a framework respecting the unities of place, time,...
Dec 1, 2006 — We left St-Michel feeling uplifted and took a nice stroll south, past the Closerie des Lilas, the restaurant made famous by Hemingway, and through the Luxembourg gardens, where a film crew was laying dolly tracks and fitting counterweights on a...
Jan 11, 2006 — The typical midlife crisis, to which we all fall victim in some major or minor degree, came to Fellini with a slight delay. On the twentieth of January, 1960, the day of his fortieth birthday, he was, in fact, too...
Mar 14, 2005 — A director is naturally a man like everyone else. Yet his life isn’t normal. For us, seeing is a necessity. For a painter, too, the problem is to see. But while the painter has to discover a static reality, or...
Essays
Mar 10, 2003 — Vilgot Sjöman’s cultural-sexual sensation sparked much critical and popular mayhem, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.
Aug 20, 2001 — Director Torben Skjødt Jensen discusses the "three aesthetic levels" with which he approaches his documentary portrait.
Essays
Aug 25, 2026 — The pioneering husband-and-wife duo transformed the field of Japanese nonfiction cinema with their portraits of spectacular, edgy personalities and collectives under duress.
The Daily
Jul 28, 2026 — Seven dynamite nights with Keaton, Chaplin, Lubitsch, Ford, Murnau, Griffith, and Raoul Walsh.
Jul 22, 2026 — The filmmaker looks back on the experiences that have shaped his creative life, including his time in art school, his work as a graphic designer and music-video director, and his early interest in documentary cinema.