The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 21, 2008 — While Agnès Varda was prescient in picking up on the new social phenomenon of France’s young female drifters, she also anticipated the culture of extreme individualism that has come to dominate Western society since the 1980s.
Nov 6, 2006 — The circumstances of our first encounters with movies are often as memorable as the movies themselves. Sometimes the juxtaposition of movie and circumstance seems merely accidental; but there are those films that change us enough that we can identify the...
Jun 19, 2006 — Decades after its backyard birth, Jack Woods’s DIY horror movie has forged a model of inspiration for succeeding generations of effects artists and low-budget filmmakers.
Features
Apr 17, 2006 — In the absence of a finished, definitive edit of Orson Welles’s enigmatic project, three writers dive into the unsolvable mystery of the film and the different versions presented in the Criterion edition.
Essays
Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.
Mar 13, 2000 — The following is excerpted from The Shifting Point, Peter Brook’s 1987 autobiography. All I wanted was a small sum of money, no script; just kids, a camera, and a beach. A young American, Lewis Allen, felt that private backers could...
Essays
Jun 10, 1996 — Ever since Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction created a sensation at [this year’s] Cannes Film Festival, where it won top honors (the Palme d’Or), it has been swathed in the wildest hyperbole. In fact, it has sparked an excitement bound to...
May 11, 2017 — Steve Gunn is regarded as one of the finest guitar players of our era. The Philadelphia native got off to an early start in high school punk bands before establishing himself as a player in different genres and touring internationally....
The director of She Came to Me and Personal Velocity talks about the most disturbing films she has ever seen, the sad humor of Miloš Forman, and the poetic-realist masterpiece that might be her favorite movie of all time.
Features
May 13, 2022 — The director of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair reflects on the transformative power of a Sonic Youth needle drop in Olivier Assayas’s 1996 film.