The Criterion Collection
Oct 9, 2015 — Guy Maddin and his filmmaking partner Evan Johnson dropped by the Criterion kitchen to talk about their new film, The Forbidden Room.
Apr 17, 2012 — When it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista! depicted something previously unseen in American fiction films—the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of view. Though writer-director-cinematographer Robert M. Young was not Latino and didn’t speak Spanish, his film convincingly...
Jan 18, 2012 — Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarating works themselves as a Marxist harangue in...
Essays
Nov 15, 2011 — The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy corresponds to the...
Jul 19, 2011 — In May 1956, an Indian film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn’t well attended. The Indian delegation had done little to promote it, arranging only a single midnight screening that clashed with a party in honor of...
Essays
Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...
Aug 14, 2006 — La collectionneuse is a strong, sensuously lush, deceptively slight film, a Riviera fruit with a bitter, uncompromising aftertaste. In retrospect, it is both classically Rohmeresque and atypical, as befits a film in which the director was still finding his way....
Essays
Jul 9, 2001 — With its dunderhead millionaires, erudite bums, effulgently dysfunctional families, and beneficent providence, My Man Godfrey is the Depression comedy par excellence. It is also, superficially at least, a movie about the Depression. A suicidal millionaire regains his zest for living...
Mar 18, 2025 — In what he described as his “first serious drama,” Charlie Chaplin channeled the influence of modernist literature, foreign cinema, and his European travels into a work of striking formal sophistication.
Feb 6, 2018 — A key collaborator on Michael Ritchie’s Downhill Racer and the creator of two Olympic films, Joe Jay Jalbert chats with us about the art of capturing skiing on-screen.