The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 21, 2017 — With D. A. Pennebaker’s groundbreaking concert film, rock music solidified its status as a universal language.
May 30, 2017 — In his brilliantly inscrutable debut, Apichatpong Weerasethakul blends documentary authenticity with wild flights of imagination.
Feb 17, 2017 — In 1970, legendary filmmaker Roger Corman founded New World Pictures, an independent studio that produced and distributed everything from B-movies and exploitation films to acclaimed foreign art-house fare by Federico Fellini, François Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman. It became a breeding...
Jan 5, 2016 — Toshiya Fujita’s two-film saga set exuberant, manga-inspired martial-arts choreography against a backdrop of a Japanese society in transition to unfold a vivid tale of epic vengeance.
Oct 7, 2015 — It’s night in the desert. Mike (River Phoenix), a teenage hustler given to bouts of narcolepsy, and Scott (Keanu Reeves), a slumming preppy prince, are huddled over a campfire. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The...
Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.
Feb 17, 2015 — It was never, of course, Yasujiro Ozu’s intention that An Autumn Afternoon (1962) should be the final film of his thirty-five-year career as a writer-director. Indeed, before he died on his sixtieth birthday, in December 1963, he had made notes...
Dec 3, 2014 — “We were just in London, clubbing, all those things people did in the ’60s in the middle of London,” British actor Francesca Annis recalls, in an interview on the new Criterion release of Macbeth, of “crossing paths” with director Roman...
Interviews
Oct 16, 2014 — This past August, on the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. A short version of the conversation was...
Interviews
Sep 16, 2014 — The following interview is from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews in the book were conducted by Rodley between January 1993 and December 1996. Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been...