The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 21, 2010 — A new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. —Michelangelo Antonioni Red Desert came out in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of the war,...
Sep 17, 2009 — Le jour se lève was Marcel Carné’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert and their third entry in the poetic realism cinema movement, following their vanguard Drôle de drame and Port of Shadows. Both of those films were...
Nov 2, 2008 — Geoffrey Macnab posts a touching personal tribute to British writer-producer-director Sidney Gilliat, “one of the unsung heroes of British cinema, an extraordinarily versatile figure who wrote and directed rip-roaring thrillers, satirical comedies, and home-front social dramas,” in the Guardian, marking...
Dec 11, 2009 — This expansive tribute to the iconic Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai was first published on the Criterion Collection’s website in fall 2005, around the time of the Criterion releases of two films starring Nakadai: Kurosawa’s Ran and the less well-known samurai...
Sep 30, 2016 — Amy Fine Collins is special correspondent to Vanity Fair, where for over twenty years she has written features about fashion, art, Hollywood, and society. An arbiter and owner of Vanity Fair’s international best-dressed list since 2003, she was inducted into...
Feb 25, 2014 — A testament to Steven Soderbergh’s versatility, this story of a boy growing up during the Great Depression is a tender but tough-minded look at a child’s inner world.
Sep 29, 2026 — With their mix of comedy, ecstasy, and aesthetic strangeness, the French auteur’s first three features grant us access to psychic states that we might not otherwise be able to enter.
The Daily
Jun 5, 2026 — We’re wrapping the week with conversations with Lilly Wachowski, Shunji Iwai, and Tsui Hark as well as essays on Ozu and Ghatak.
Essays
May 12, 2026 — Sexuality—how one defines it, lives with it, hides it, shuns it, or wields it—is inextricable from matters of socioeconomic class, though rare is the American film that centralizes this intersectional reality. The foundational myth of the American dream puts forth...