The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Sep 17, 2013 — The author sheds some light on the fascinating life of the American scriptwriter behind Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan.
Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.
Jan 21, 2014 — Bigger is better in Stanley Kramer’s crazily crammed slapstick epic, a timeless showcase for comedy genius.
Essays
May 10, 2011 — Something Wild asks the eternal question “What makes us happy?” But the answer it proposes is far from easily arrived at. It’s a boy meets girl story, certainly, but one that goes much deeper with that narrative than most films...
Mar 17, 2008 — During the Second World War, when Hiroshi Teshigahara was a schoolboy, Japan’s cities—above all his hometown, Tokyo—were mercilessly firebombed. He, and his future associates in countless artistic undertakings, returned to a landscape of bleak ruins. The adolescent Hiroshi was particularly...
On the Channel
Apr 20, 2023 — This month’s highlights include tributes to Jennifer Jason Leigh and Seijun Suzuki and a collection of Asian American films from the 1980s.
Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...
Essays
Nov 18, 2025 — This tale of paranoia and romantic jealousy slyly combines the conventions of popular Mexican filmmaking with the surrealist sensibility that made its director, Luis Buñuel, a legendary figure in his native Spain.
Features
Aug 1, 2023 — “Do you want me to turn them loose?” This is what cowboy Perce asks a sad-eyed Roslyn in John Huston’s elegiac The Misfits (1961), and that one question about untying the mustangs he and fellow wranglers Gay (Clark Gable) and...
Nov 17, 2015 — Satyajit Ray began his filmmaking career by offering a vision of the young Apu, the character he would go on to follow throughout the three films of his stunning breakthrough epic.