The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 26, 2003 — Embracing the world while pretending to sneer at it, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s crime film is rich, deep, and wily.
Essays
Aug 20, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s generous-hearted satire achieves a synthesis that is both terribly funny and deeply moving.
Essays
Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer’s 17th-century period piece leaves all major questions frustratingly unresolved yet vibrantly open, quivering and radiant with life and meaning.
Jun 26, 2000 — Kevin Smith writes about his third feature as a sort of penance/valentine for the woman who made him grow up.
Essays
Oct 18, 1998 — 1986 was not a good time to make a film which attempted to capture the Punk spirit. Deep into second-term Reagan/Thatcher, American and British pop culture were infected with cynicism, hopelessness, immobility. So when Alex Cox came over with his...
Essays
May 10, 1993 — Green for Danger is a welcome twist on that most venerable of English concoctions, the drawing-room thriller. In this instance, the drawing room is instead a hospital not far from London, where surgery is conducted under a cascade of German...
Essays
Jul 15, 1991 — For only his second studio film, Peter Bogdanovich chanced directing an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s elegiac novel about teenagers who come of age in a dying Texas town in the early fifties.
Essays
Apr 10, 1989 — Two years after The Horse’s Mouth director Ronald Neame cast Alec Guinness in this film, based on a book by James Kennaway.
Nov 17, 1986 — The best of all the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn comedies, Adam’s Rib is as fresh and topical today as it was in 1949 when it was first released. Written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by George Cukor, this...