The Criterion Collection
Sep 13, 2004 — Fifteen years ago I received a letter from a young film director in Texas, who enclosed a tape of his first film, with the unlikely title It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. It might as well have...
Essays
Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...
Mar 10, 2003 — The Swedish director of I Am Curious explains how he fused the themes of eroticism, self-exploration, voyeurism, and nonviolence into a film about the new freedoms of the young. QUESTION: I Am Curious seemed to be a cinematic Tristram Shandy,...
Sep 22, 1997 — The English Patient was the ?rst book of Michael Ondaatje’s I had read, and I thought it was remarkable.Two weeks after ?nishing the novel, Anthony Minghella telephoned from London and asked, “How could we do this as a movie?” Being...
Jan 28, 1991 — The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Pauline Kael. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in...
The celebrated actors select favorite movies starring their friends Jason Schwartzman and Jane Fonda, regale us with stories about Omar Sharif and David Lynch, and share their love for films by Hal Ashby and David Lean.
The writer and director returns to the Criterion Closet, where he pays tribute to David Lynch, praises Mikey and Nicky as a perfect collaboration between a director and actors, and reminisces about watching Persona in Ingmar Bergman’s theater on Fårö...
The actor shares what he loves about Preston Sturges and Alfred Hitchcock, recommends Brief Encounter and other intimate works by David Lean, and selects films featuring favorite actors like Claude Rains and Carole Lombard.
In June 2025, the New York Times published a list of the 100 best movies released since January 1, 2000, as voted on by more than 500 influential directors, actors, and other notable names in Hollywood and around the world....
The celebrated actors and costars of The Return recommend favorites to each other, share their love for Andrei Tarkovsky and Orson Welles, and discover such Eclipse box sets as The First Films of Samuel Fuller and Basil Dearden’s London Underground.