The Criterion Collection
Oct 20, 2015 — Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien is back with an awe-inspiring martial-arts epic.
Sneak Peeks
Apr 6, 2015 — In 2004 and 2005, the makers of Hoop Dreams, in collaboration with Criterion, revisited the documentary’s principle figures, Arthur Agee and William Gates, along with their families, to see what had been happening in their lives since the film’s premiere...
Dec 9, 2013 — The critic and WCP executive director offers a personal take on art cinema and a primer on the project’s scope and mission.
Jun 12, 2012 — Hal Ashby’s delicately off-kilter May-December romance stars two of the unlikeliest countercultural icons of the seventies.
Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...
Jan 11, 2011 — Given the scarcity of information available in the sixties, director Byron Haskin did a remarkable job of representing some of the conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, nearly a year before the first close-up views of the real Martian surface.
Jul 19, 2010 — “Why do you want to dance?” “Why do you want to live?” A question followed by another question stands at the beating heart of The Red Shoes. It’s an entirely rhetorical exchange, but it underscores the power and the mystery...
May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...
Nov 27, 2008 — An enormous welter of insoluble problems is on display in Luis Buñuel’s classic—the ending solves nothing; the story just begins again.