The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 24, 2025 — The product of a famously tumultuous production, William Friedkin’s nerve-jangling adaptation of the classic suspense novel The Wages of Fear infuses the mechanics of genre with rough-hewn realism and the New Hollywood’s renegade spirit.
May 27, 2025 — In the singular mid-1980s TV show Eternity’s Pillar, the jazz iconoclast gives viewers a chance to experience the healing powers of her music—and the intense spiritual practice that fuels it.
May 20, 2025 — A film about and against everything, this astonishingly original comedy attacks Big Brother, the bomb, and the incipient collapse of our planetary ecosystem, along with the lies that stop us from recognizing all of the above.
May 20, 2025 — Set in the dying days of the 1960s, Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical tale of two unemployed actors is a triumph of screenwriting and a brilliant showcase for then-unknown stars Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann.
May 12, 2025 — Constance Tsang is a Chinese American writer, director, and educator based in New York. Her first feature, Blue Sun Palace, was awarded the French Touch Prize by the jury at the 2024 Cannes Critics’ Week and was an official selection...
Essays
Apr 29, 2025 — In this exuberant and moving portrait of a Brooklyn sex worker, Sean Baker draws on themes he has explored throughout his career, depicting the workaday grind of twenty-first-century American existence with biting humor and clear-eyed humanity.
Essays
Apr 29, 2025 — A black-and-white version of Julian Schnabel’s portrait of his fellow artist and friend Jean-Michel Basquiat accentuates the film’s melancholy mood while highlighting the deep commitment of Jeffrey Wright’s performance.
Apr 24, 2025 — Perfume Genius (Mike Hadreas) began his music career in 2008 and released his debut album, Learning, in 2010 through his longtime label home, Matador Records. The album immediately drew critics’ attention to Hadreas’s ability to convey emotional vulnerability with his...
Mar 21, 2025 — Anthony Banua-Simon is an award-winning filmmaker and editor as well as an adjunct professor in film editing. His films Third Shift and Cane Fire have both played on the Criterion Channel. The films he has chosen for this list have...
Mar 18, 2025 — In what he described as his “first serious drama,” Charlie Chaplin channeled the influence of modernist literature, foreign cinema, and his European travels into a work of striking formal sophistication.