The Criterion Collection
Jul 13, 2021 — Miles: I just sold a building on the Lower East Side and tripled my money Molly: There’s a lot of that happening these days. Released the year before Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), Working Girls, a film about sex work, is a sharper by far...
Essays
Nov 10, 2020 — The coming-of-age drama is generally thought of as portraying adolescence—the sexual awakening, the high-school cliques, the angst about the future. At least that’s the assumption on which Hollywood has profitably based its avalanche of teen pics for lo these many...
Features
May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...
Production Notes
Oct 2, 2019 — 1. Local Hero was the first film soundtrack that Dire Straits singer and guitarist Mark Knopfler ever composed and performed, and the album was so successful that it reportedly made more money than the film. The final song in the...
Features
Aug 28, 2019 — 1. Before he became a filmmaker, D. A. Pennebaker’s ambition was to play stride piano like Fats Waller. “What changed your mind?” I asked him. “Well,” Penny replied, “after I saw Fats play . . . ” Penny would have...
Oct 24, 2017 — In this intimate psychological thriller, Olivier Assayas interrogates contemporary society’s near-religious reliance on technology and its mediation of reality.
Essays
Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.
Interviews
Sep 16, 2014 — The following interview is from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews in the book were conducted by Rodley between January 1993 and December 1996. Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been...
Essays
Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.
Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...