The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 10, 2020 — The coming-of-age drama is generally thought of as portraying adolescence—the sexual awakening, the high-school cliques, the angst about the future. At least that’s the assumption on which Hollywood has profitably based its avalanche of teen pics for lo these many...
Tech Corner
Oct 2, 2020 — The Lady Eve, from 1941, is my favorite of all of Preston Sturges’s comedies. I would wager to say that it’s Barbara Stanwyck’s best performance, though I also love her in Double Indemnity and Forty Guns. Heck, I love her in everything she’s in. But...
Sep 10, 2020 — In this in-depth interview, the legendary photographer and filmmaker explains how a lifetime of compulsive movie-watching has influenced her artistic practice.
Aug 11, 2020 — I’ve often found that the most successful short films and short stories apply what Ernest Hemingway called the “iceberg theory,” distilling a larger narrative into a very specific moment that allows audiences to infer the bigger picture in their own...
Aug 3, 2020 — The British director of sprightly musicals, wrenching family dramas, and gripping political thrillers was seventy-six.
On the Channel
Jul 30, 2020 — Channel Calendars Stuck at home this summer? Don’t let that get you down—our Bad Vacations series makes the case for staying in and watching movies, cataloguing an array of holiday horrors ranging from existential ennui to full-throttle terror. That’s just...
Jul 21, 2020 — Consider this an afterword to Taste of Cherry (1997), the feature that brought its director, Abbas Kiarostami, to full international prominence, after it became the first Iranian movie to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (where it...
Jul 6, 2020 — The latest short film to take the spotlight on the Criterion Channel, Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s Dirt Daughter emerged from the collaboration of a vibrant community of artists. Not only was it produced by the innovative collective the Eyeslicer, which supports...
Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...
Features
Jun 15, 2020 — The hugely popular and prolific Italian actor Alberto Sordi relished playing rogues, characters riddled with foibles and weaknesses. In an interview with Positif’s Jean A. Gili in 1999, he revealed that his aim was to depict in a comic register...