The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 14, 1998 — Adirector who knows his genres, Jonathan Demme has never been able to resist turning them inside out. Starting in the film industry as a publicist, Demme was soon hired by Roger Corman as a scriptwriter and then as a director....
Essays
Dec 3, 1990 — Over the years I have had a recurrent nightmare in which I am summoned to a large, unfamiliar building in a middle-European satellite country (Bulgaria, perhaps) to tell the idea of Annie Hall to the Bulgarian Minister of Green Lights,...
Essays
Apr 11, 1988 — Over the years countless films have been made about war, its horrors and its devastations—few, however, have been as moving and heartfelt as René Clément’s.
Feb 13, 2024 — Through its echoes, resonances, and intricately branching stories, this cycle of films evokes the feeling that life, like the weather, is based on patterns too complex to ever be fully predictable.
Features
Feb 13, 2023 — Desperately seeking community in her college years, the writer discovered the world of experimental cinema when she stumbled on a short-film program at an art-house in Manchester, England.
Jan 24, 2023 — Filled with evocative images and guided by the unique aesthetic sensibility of the landlocked kingdom of Lesotho, Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s film is an exploration of the power of grief that is paradoxically uplifting.
May 21, 2021 — Known for her resilient heroines, the prolific Japanese actor finds agency through moments of hesitation in one of her seventeen collaborations with Mikio Naruse.
Aug 3, 2020 — The first European box-office success of the movement dubbed the New German Cinema, Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s 1975 The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum took on a hot-button issue: the paranoia provoked by homegrown terrorism and the opportunity that...
May 24, 2019 — Elia Suleiman, who returned to Cannes this year with his latest film, talks with us about comedy as a form of political resistance.