The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 1, 2025 — Made nearly two decades into Fritz Lang’s Hollywood career, this brutal noir is designed for maximum velocity and impact, eschewing the director’s accustomed flourishes in favor of a stark literalness.
Aug 12, 2024 — The great actor creates an unforgettable portrait of a man worn down by the world in Tamara Jenkins’s darkly funny and deeply moving family drama.
Dec 6, 2022 — Known for their austerity and shocking moments of violence, the Austrian director’s first three films cultivate a kind of humanism in their dogged refusal to coddle the viewer.
Nov 12, 2020 — All five films up for best feature are directed by women.
Essays
Jul 16, 2018 — In this essay originally published in the New Yorker, Roger Angell hails Ron Shelton’s comic ode to baseball as one of the few movies to capture the essence of the sport.
May 21, 2018 — Beyond the Hills (2012) tells the story of a real-life Romanian tragedy that attracted international media attention in 2005: the death of a young woman submitted to a shockingly medieval exorcism at a small monastery in Moldavia. The monastery was...
The Daily
Dec 30, 2017 — Cinema lost a few giants this year, some soldiers, some heroes, duly heralded or not, and links from a good number of the names here will take you to collections of remembrances. I’ve also added notes and a few more...
Jun 15, 2016 — Although afflicted by on-set drama and offscreen tragedy, Jean Renoir’s La Chienne shows the director’s early mastery of sound cinema and features the trademarks that would come to define his style.
Essays
Oct 18, 2022 — Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s hypnotic serial-killer film dives into the realm of the uncanny and envisions the breakdown of Japanese society.
Aug 23, 2018 — The director of Computer Chess and Support the Girls finds in John Cassavetes a surrealist whose weirdest set pieces could make David Lynch blush.