The Criterion Collection
On the Channel
Jan 27, 2022 — We’re celebrating Black History Month with tributes to trailblazing artists like Harry Belafonte, Melvin Van Peebles, and documentary master Stanley Nelson.
Dec 7, 2021 — Regina King’s feature-film directorial debut envisions the true-life convergence of four prominent Black figures with empathy and moral urgency.
Sep 29, 2021 — Luchino Visconti’s scandalous antifascist melodrama envisions the liquidation of desire with expressionistic panache.
Essays
Sep 28, 2021 — The first Black-directed movie musical of the modern film era, Melvin Van Peebles’s drama illuminates the cultural and political concerns of working-class Black people with delight and fancy.
Sep 24, 2021 — The celebration of the life and work of the filmmaker, novelist, rebel, and father has just begun.
Features
Jul 9, 2021 — A raucous, fast-talking diva, the actor had a remarkable ability to convey both glamour and silliness, a gift that made her the queen of screwball comedy before her untimely death in 1942.
May 11, 2021 — When Fast Times at Ridgemont High came out, in the summer of 1982, I was almost exactly the same age as Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Stacy Hamilton, getting ready to start my sophomore year in high school. Like Stacy’s world-weary older...
The Daily
Sep 11, 2020 — As Toronto opens, here’s an overview of early critical response to some of the festival’s titles arriving directly from their premieres in Venice.
Jun 10, 2020 — Years ago I took a seminar on movie stars led by the writer Wayne Koestenbaum, a glittering episode that closed out a rather colorless stint in graduate school. The syllabus was replete with inspired double bills—Deleuze on Leibniz + Lana...
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...