The Criterion Collection
Sneak Peeks
Aug 6, 2014 — Lawrence Kasdan has had quite an impressive career in Hollywood, moving from cowriting blockbusters like The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark to writing and directing his own, more personal films. In this excerpt from a new...
Visual Analysis
Aug 4, 2014 — Film scholar James Quandt created a nearly hour-long visual essay for our new collector’s set The Essential Jacques Demy. Titled Jacques Demy, A to Z, it elaborates on twenty-six concepts important to understanding the cinema of this singular filmmaker. For...
Tech Corner
Jul 21, 2014 — Restoration SpotlightThe following short program, which also appears as a supplement in our new box set The Essential Jacques Demy, gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the painstaking 2013 digital restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which brought the film back...
Jun 2, 2014 — One Scene When I first heard about The Human Condition (1959–61), I was already familiar with director Masaki Kobayashi’s irreverent Harakiri (1962), a favorite film of mine where samurai are scum of the earth and honor is equivalent to dirt....
Short Takes
May 20, 2014 — In this new, online-exclusive video for Criterion, Wes Anderson, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, and Willem Dafoe reminisce about the challenging conditions under which they made The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Sneak Peeks
Apr 9, 2014 — As Emily Watson told us in an interview for our release of Breaking the Waves, which comes out next week, she had “hardly been in front of a camera ever before” when she shot Lars von Trier’s devastasting and explicit...
Sneak Peeks
Apr 8, 2014 — Jean-Pierre Léaud defines the word precocious in this charming 16 mm footage of the confident teenager’s audition for François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. As we know, the rest is history. You can see more from Léaud’s audition (including some improvised...
Sneak Peeks
Mar 28, 2014 — By the time he made The Freshman in 1925, Harold Lloyd was already a superstar. His comedies, which combined jaw-dropping derring-do with loveable characters, were routinely among their years’ top box-office attractions. When Lloyd announced he was working on a...
Mar 24, 2014 — Rome is as exquisite as it is suffocating in Paolo Sorrentino’s profound tale of contemporary entropy.
Sneak Peeks
Mar 19, 2014 — Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress has long been cited as an influence on George Lucas’s Star Wars. An avid fan of Kurosawa’s, Lucas would eventually work with the Japanese auteur, executive producing the international version of his 1980 Kagemusha. In...