The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Sep 3, 2015 — Wes Craven, who died this week at age seventy-six, was a horror master with few equals in contemporary American movies. The director of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream may not often be spoken of in the same breath...
Jul 7, 2015 — Our recollections of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 movie The Killers are apt to center on three primary elements: Ernest Hemingway’s story, so literally brought to the screen in the film’s opening scenes; Ava Gardner, carrying the full weight of that late-forties...
Jul 6, 2015 — The Killers (1946) is exemplary film noir from Robert Siodmak, who, on the strength of three films—this, Phantom Lady (1944), and Criss Cross (1949)—stands beside his fellow European exiles Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger as one of noir’s crucial directors....
Sneak Peeks
May 28, 2015 — We sat down with the eminent German cinema scholar Eric Rentschler for a new interview about The Merchant of Four Seasons, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first Douglas Sirk–inspired film. In this excerpt, Rentschler describes the major turning point the movie represented...
May 1, 2015 — In his first feature, Jean-Pierre Melville found subtly radical ways to adapt Vercors's underground French novel about quiet resistance against the German occupation.
Apr 14, 2015 — Before he turned Vienna into a labyrinth of shadows with The Third Man, Carol Reed brought film noir to Belfast for this stylishly fatalistic tale of a man caught up in political violence.
Mar 30, 2015 — A master of using the camera to draw truth from interview subjects, Errol Morris was unsurprisingly a candid and fascinating interview subject himself in new supplements we made for the Criterion releases of Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida and The Thin...
Mar 24, 2015 — Words—they conceal and reveal so much about us, as Errol Morris’s elusive and brilliant first films attest.
Features
Mar 19, 2015 — The author recalls his encounters and correspondence with the filmmaker.
Mar 9, 2015 — François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.