The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 12, 2015 — Michael Haneke’s politically prescient drama explores the tenuous, uneasy connections between inhabitants of a globally interwoven Europe.
Nov 11, 2015 — Michael Haneke’s 2000 drama Code Unknown is a formalist masterwork—its narrative, about a group of characters whose lives become entwined by an incident on the streets of Paris, unfolding almost entirely within a series of single-take vignettes. Our DVD and...
Oct 15, 2015 — Arnaud Desplechin stopped by for a visit and dispensed a few of his gems of wisdom.
Sep 28, 2015 — Rarely has schizophrenia been closer to the surface of American cinema than in the transitional period of 1968–71. Hollywood had just abandoned its censorship code after nearly thirty-five years, and the behemoth studios were heaving and rattling into oblivion or...
Aug 17, 2015 — François Truffaut’s love letter to the movies is a lightheartedly self-reflexive symphony of camera movement and musical flourish.
Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.
May 22, 2015 — A music star burns brightly and flames out beautifully in Mark Rydell’s visceral rock-and-roll film, starring a sensational Bette Midler.
May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.
Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...
Essays
Feb 28, 2014 — Other first films exude the sparkling joy of filmmaking that one feels in Breathless, but how many can boast its sure-handedness?