The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 26, 2000 — Brief Encounter was the fourth and final film that David Lean made in association with Noël Coward. Derived from Still Life, a one-act play which Coward included in the portmanteau Tonight 8:30, the story tells of a suburban housewife, Laura...
Mar 9, 1992 — The ads for Boyz N the Hood, the debut of a 23-year old writer-director named John Singleton, treated the film as if it took place in another galaxy—a mysterious fiefdom far, far away. And so it does, set in a...
May 19, 2026 — “Last night, I was in the Kingdom of Shadows,” proclaimed Maxim Gorky, writing about an 1896 projection of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. “Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and...
Mar 29, 2022 — About half an hour into love jones, Theodore Witcher’s romance from 1997 starring Larenz Tate and Nia Long, the two main characters amble along a Chicago block as raindrops fall, soft but insistent. The colors are warm, naturalistic—browns, mauves, and...
Essays
May 27, 2020 — In John Cassavetes’s Husbands, the director, Ben Gazzara, and Peter Falk play Gus, Harry, and Archie, three middle-aged, middle-class suburbanites who come together at the funeral of their close mutual friend Stuart, and, united in grief, commence drinking together. And...
Essays
Dec 14, 2016 — Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.
In Theaters
Jun 1, 2016 — Repertory PicksThis week, as part of a complete survey of Robert Aldrich’s career (running through mid-August), the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will screen the director’s explosive 1955 noir masterpiece Kiss Me Deadly. Based on Mickey Spillane’s pulp novel...
Nov 15, 2011 — You make films to give people something, to transport them somewhere else, and it doesn’t matter if you transport them to a world of intuition or a world of the intellect.Krzysztof Kieślowski said that he did not care about cinema,...
Nov 2, 2009 — The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire. And we, spectators always, everywhere,looking at, never out of, everything!—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy” At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a...