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Aug 13, 2010 — The Docks of New York When John Grierson, the Scotsman whose absolute devotion to realism on film—he coined the word documentary and created the National Film Board of Canada—was asked how he’d enjoyed a screening of a now-lost Josef von Sternberg...

Aug 9, 2010 — San Francisco filmmaker Terry Zwigoff’s first cinematic effort, the 1985 Louie Bluie, is a wry, ribald, and magical portrait of the country-blues string band player and irrepressible raconteur Howard Armstrong (a.k.a. Louie Bluie). This catchy, engaging sixty-minute documentary, a clattering...

Cinema history is dotted with thunderous works of art that announced their makers’ brilliance right out of the gate.

Jul 29, 2010 — Criterion designer extraordinaire Eric Skillman used a distinctive drawing style of his own devising for our release of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (and blogged about it here and here). Sitting across from him in a meeting the other day, we noticed...

Jun 29, 2010 — We know that one of the most discussed aspects of a Criterion release is its cover art. So we wanted to draw your attention to a fascinating, entertaining blog post by Sam Smith, who designed the packaging for our new...

Jun 22, 2010 — Sitting on a hard drive here in the office is the unedited footage of an interview we shot here with Peter Brunette on April 26, for an upcoming release of Senso. The release had been delayed, but I told Peter that since...

Jun 18, 2010 — Terry Zwigoff’s 1995 documentary Crumb, which is coming to the Criterion Collection on DVD and Blu-ray in August, is an almost unbelievably intimate portrait of the underground comics icon Robert Crumb, as well as an examination of his controversial work. And,...

Jun 16, 2010 — What seems so extraordinary to me about Mystery Train, watching it again twenty years after its deadpan arrival, is not just how fresh and vivid—how utterly timeless—it remains but the extent to which it truly embraces both the myth and...

Jun 7, 2010 — Fans of Jim Jarmusch in the Columbus, Ohio, area may want to steam down to the Wexner Center for the Arts tonight for a release party for Criterion’s new DVD and Blu-ray special editions of Mystery Train. Our technical director...

May 25, 2010 — In the films of Stan Brakhage, the viewer’s role must be reimagined: from a passive receiver to one who meets the film halfway, actively plumbing the depths of its imagery and the various themes and ideas suggested by its subject...