The BFG

Apr 22, 2015 — Knowing Martin Scorsese was a fan of Jean Renoir’s India-set The River, we asked him to record an introduction when we first released it in 2004 (since then, he even included it in his Criterion Top 10, calling it “a...

Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...

Mar 30, 2015 — A master of using the camera to draw truth from interview subjects, Errol Morris was unsurprisingly a candid and fascinating interview subject himself in new supplements we made for the Criterion releases of Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida and The Thin...

Mar 11, 2015 — Critics love to talk about modern auteurs in terms of their influences, and François Truffaut has never been an exception. For our release of The Soft Skin, out next week in Blu-ray and DVD editions, critic and filmmaker Kent Jones...

Feb 15, 2015 — Among the most exciting supplements on our new release of Jean Renoir’s classic short A Day in the Country is an eighty-nine-minute compilation of outtakes from the film, titled Un tournage à la campagne, which features revelatory behind-the-scenes footage of...

Jan 21, 2015 — Money can’t buy love and happiness in Preston Sturges’s classic comedy—or can it?

Jan 14, 2015 — Legendary German-born cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Broadcast News, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas) broke through in film working with Rainer Werner Fassbinder. After shooting Whity and Beware of a Holy Whore for the filmmaker, Ballhaus was enlisted to visualize The...

Jan 6, 2015 — Kihachi Okamoto's The Sword of Doom is likely to strike the unalerted viewer as an exercise in absurdist violence, tracking the career of a nihilistic swordsman from his gratuitous murder of a defenseless old man to his final descent into...

Dec 28, 2014 — In person, Sam was a blunt-nosed nonconformist, small of stature but forever leading with his Cuban cigar.

Dec 24, 2014 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s poignant Morning for the Osone Family looks at grief over World War II from the perspective of one Japanese family. Shot immediately following the country’s surrender, when directors like Kinoshita were no longer under the thumb of wartime...