The Criterion Collection
Features
Oct 2, 2014 — The following is a chapter on The Innocents from cinematographer Freddie Francis’s memoir, The Straight Story from “Moby Dick” to “Glory.” It is reproduced here courtesy of Scarecrow Press. The last picture I worked on as a cinematographer in my...
Oct 2, 2014 — People struggle to escape their socially dictated roles in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s moving, Douglas Sirk–inspired melodrama.
Sneak Peeks
Sep 30, 2014 — Sundays and Cybèle—Serge Bourguignon’s searing French drama about an unorthodox relationship between a traumatized war veteran and a young girl—was not an easy film to market. Its subject matter is difficult, and the complexity of its characters’ lives and motivations...
Sneak Peeks
Sep 30, 2014 — When we first released Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 2003, we asked filmmaker Todd Haynes to provide a video introduction. The year before, he had released his masterful Far from Heaven, a reworking of Douglas Sirk’s...
Sneak Peeks
Sep 29, 2014 — The great cinematographer Freddie Francis’s brilliant work on Jack Clayton’s chilling 1961 horror movie The Innocents is widely admired by movie lovers and professionals. For an appreciation of this film’s incredible visuals, we turned to cinematographer John Bailey (The Big...
Sep 26, 2014 — For this week’s festival of free films on Hulu, we put French bombshell Brigitte Bardot in the spotlight. The gorgeous actor, singer, and model burst onto the scene with Roger Vadim’s scandalous 1956 romp And God Created Woman, and was...
Visual Analysis
Sep 25, 2014 — All That Jazz echoes the tropes of the classic backstage movie musical, but it’s also a groundbreaking work of cinema, thanks largely to Bob Fosse and editor Alan Heim’s avant-garde approach to editing. In this Criterion video essay, critic Matt...
Essays
Sep 24, 2014 — Roman Polanski’s dark vision is the perfect fit for Shakespeare’s grim tale of treachery and ambition.
Sep 23, 2014 — In director Jack Clayton’s hands, Henry James’s tale of the sinister and sensual things hiding behind Victorian decorum becomes one of the screen’s great works of terror.
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...