The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 23, 2017 — In his radical debut feature, Ousmane Sembène reveals the agony of the postcolonial experience through the story of a Senegalese migrant abused by her French employers.
Jan 19, 2017 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder plays a working-class gay man hoodwinked by his uppity bourgeois lover in this unsparing portrait of queer culture in 1970s West Germany.
Nov 25, 2016 — In his deeply personal third feature, Noah Baumbach charts a family’s dissolution against the backdrop of 1980s literary Brooklyn.
Jun 4, 2016 — Wim Wenders’s road movies, Michael Almereyda writes, are “at once minimal and romantic, austere and lyrical,” focusing on questions—of individuals and society, culture and nature—that Wenders has returned to throughout his career.
Essays
May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.
Essays
Jun 25, 2015 — German director Bernhard Wicki proved his uncommon cinematic skill with his heartbreaking tale of teen soldiers sent off to die near the end of World War II.
Jun 17, 2015 — From a shrewd adaptation by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, Jonathan Demme fashions a visually inventive dreamscape out of an Ibsen classic.
Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.
Nov 17, 2014 — Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable’s effortless banter is pure magic, but Frank Capra’s comedy is rooted in the reality of the times.
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?