The Criterion Collection
Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.
Feb 10, 2003 — The poet Paul Eluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car. Ordinarily, I would settle for that. However, with so much being written about the film...
Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...
Essays
Dec 31, 2000 — Those who felt that Scandinavian cinema had passed into retirement along with Ingmar Bergman should be startled by Insomnia. This immaculately constructed psychological thriller sets a benchmark for other Scandinavian directors to match, and is one of the most unusual...
The writer and director reminisces about seeing Short Cuts at the Venice Film Festival, selects Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence out of love for Ryuichi Sakamoto, and takes home the one Stanley Kubrick film he hasn’t see.
The writer and director of All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt selects films that have left an indelible mark on her sensibility, praising the revelatory inspiration of Lynne Ramsay’s short films and the visceral effect of The Piano Teacher, and...
Dec 2, 2025 — In a string of short films he made in the 1920s, Man Ray brought a restlessly inventive spirit to a young medium, pushing the boundaries of cinematic form with frenetic editing, abstract imagery, and surrealist camera tricks.
Feb 10, 2015 — The late film scholar beautifully analyzes the visual lyricism of the French master’s legendary short work.
Apr 28, 2003 — François Truffaut’s short Antoine Doinel film exposes an entire universe of male adolescent experience.