The Criterion Collection
Essays
Aug 11, 2020 — The Complete Films of Agnès Varda The poster for the seventy-second Cannes Film Festival, held in May 2019, used a photograph taken during the shooting of Agnès Varda’s first film, La Pointe Courte, in 1954. Wearing rolled-up trousers, a shirt,...
Essays
Nov 26, 2018 — The Magnificent Ambersons In his interviews with Peter Bogdanovich published as This Is Orson Welles, Welles speaks nostalgically of the time he spent with his father in a tranquil enclave of 1920s Illinois, comparing it to “a childhood back in...
Nov 11, 2016 — The DailyLegendary French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, who created some of the most indelible images in film history, has passed away at the age of ninety-two. The BFI pays tribute to him by republishing an article from the winter 1965–1966 issue...
Visual Analysis
Nov 17, 2019 — Under the Influence As an aspiring filmmaker in the early nineties, Ira Sachs first sat down to watch Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feature debut, Je tu il elle, about an adrift young woman (played by the director herself) grasping for human connection. At the...
Visual Analysis
Feb 19, 2019 — Under the Influence Debuts don’t get much more auspicious than Hale County This Morning, This Evening. Widely acclaimed and Oscar-nominated, RaMell Ross’s first feature-length documentary trains its lyrical focus on two young Alabamians’ divergent paths into adulthood, all while reflecting...
Visual Analysis
Feb 13, 2017 — Under the InfluenceBack in the fall, writer-director Anna Biller traveled to New York from Los Angeles for the theatrical premiere of her third feature, The Love Witch, a subversive horror-fantasy about a spell-casting temptress who falls prey to the psychosis...
Visual Analysis
Dec 21, 2016 — Under the InfluenceEarlier this month, director Mike Mills paid a visit to New York in support of his third narrative feature, 20th Century Women, a deeply personal coming-of-age tale about a teenage boy growing up in Carter-era Southern California with...
Jun 6, 2014 — The Daily• Sam Fuller, D-Day veteran • Happy birthday, Chantal Akerman • When John Cassavetes and friends drove Dick Cavett mad • A fresh look at the career of Vanessa Redgrave • Hard Day’s hard facts • Eye-opening makeup effects...
Jul 14, 2026 — The legacy of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game has become inextricably entangled with a defining trope of AIDS-era mainstream queer representation: the revelation that exposes the gender identity of a transgender character. By the time of the American release of...
Jul 14, 2026 — On October 30, 1992, the Provisional Irish Republican Army set off two bombs as part of an ongoing campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland. One, a small explosive planted alarmingly close to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing...