The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?
Essays
Nov 12, 2013 — Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig create a luminous, romantic portrait of a young woman looking for fulfillment in New York City.
Sneak Peeks
Sep 10, 2013 — Novelist John Le Carré created one of literature’s most fascinating characters in Alec Leamas, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s main heavy, who is on a final, fateful mission in East Germany. In Martin Ritt’s movie version, now...
Essays
Aug 13, 2013 — John Frankenheimer burrows into the insidious side of the American sixties in his visually dazzling thriller.
Apr 22, 2013 — A vivid portrait of a ruthless murderer, Laurence Olivier’s Technicolor Shakespeare adaptation is back in a killer restoration.
Essays
Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.
Essays
Aug 18, 2011 — Stanley Kubrick’s labyrinthine 1956 heist flick The Killing—an exploded rethink of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle and eventual template for the narrative convolutions of Reservoir Dog—became an instant facet in the jewel that was film noir, even as it refracted...
Jun 27, 2011 — Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing, the late silent film People on Sunday (1930) has...
Apr 12, 2011 — With his 1970 gangster epic Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.
Apr 12, 2011 — Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, drew a circle with a piece of red chalk and said: “When men, even unknowingly, are to meet one day, whatever may befall each, whatever their diverging paths, on the said day, they will inevitably come...