The Criterion Collection
May 18, 2020 — It’s hard to imagine Hollywood without Frances Marion. The story of the screenwriter’s career is entwined with the story of Hollywood itself, from its pioneer days to the Golden Age. Part of Marion’s skill as a writer was how her...
Essays
May 12, 2020 — In the early 1950s, director John Sturges, then under contract at MGM, read a condensed version of Paul Brickhill’s memoir The Great Escape, which details the mass escape of downed fighter pilots from the German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III...
Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...
On the Channel
Dec 6, 2019 — Starting this weekend on the Criterion Channel, you’ll be able to steal some time with one of cinema’s most pulse-pounding subgenres. In the heist movie, even the most perfectly planned crimes run the risk of going awry, putting the mettle...
The Daily
Nov 15, 2019 — This week’s highlights take us from post-apocalyptic cityscapes to the deepest jungles of Southeast Asia, from the sound stages of Hollywood to the coal mines of West Virginia.
The Daily
Oct 3, 2019 — The director reunites with writer Jonathan Raymond and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt for a quiet tale set in the Oregon Territory of the 1820s.
The Daily
Sep 4, 2019 — After Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, it’s Timothée Chalamet’s turn to lead the English to the Battle of Agincourt.
Features
Sep 2, 2019 — Dark Passages Thieves’ Highway A hay cart trundles through a sunny field above Fresno, California, in the opening shot of Thieves’ Highway. This is not an image you expect to see in film noir, which most often breeds in cities, alienated from the...
The Daily
Jul 23, 2019 — The festival announces an intriguing closing night film, and the sidebar known to most as Venice Days unveils its lineup.
Features
Jun 7, 2019 — He is the most disarming and self-effacing of the English actors who dominated stage and screen in the middle of the twentieth century—the others were John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, and Laurence Olivier. Those fellows carried themselves like grand...