The Criterion Collection
Jan 17, 2023 — One of contemporary cinema’s most provocative filmmakers launched his career with three deeply unnerving, deliriously genre-blending portraits of Europe.
Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...
Essays
Jan 26, 2021 — Larisa Shepitko was born in eastern Ukraine in 1938. Her mother was a schoolteacher; her father, who left the family, fought in World War II. Her mother raised her and her two siblings on her own, and the moment Larisa...
Jun 29, 2015 — This work of hallucinatory lyricism was one of the final and freest expressions of the rule-flouting New Wave movement in Czechoslovakia.
Dec 3, 2013 — This scathing drama about a toxic society established Elio Petri as an important director of popular political entertainment in Italy.
Mar 15, 2011 — Based on Louis Malle’s childhood memories, this period drama traces the wary, prickly friendship between two boys, one of whom is hiding from the Nazis.
Features
Mar 8, 2021 — “I see the beauty now,” my mother told me when I asked her what she thought of Cicely Tyson’s face, about a week after the pathbreaking actor died in January at ninety-six. “But I didn’t then.” By “then,” she meant...
Jun 23, 2020 — In Céline Sciamma’s unabashedly romantic and fiercely political film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), two women fall in love and set each other free, if for only a few glorious days or weeks. It is one of the...
The Daily
May 27, 2025 — The triumphant return of Jafar Panahi capped off what many consider to be a terrific year at Cannes.