The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...
Jun 17, 2009 — Celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave have been popping up all over, and now New York is also about to ride the crest. The Museum of Arts and Design and the Museum of the Moving Image...
Essays
Feb 1, 1999 — After finishing Diabolique, heralded French director-screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) confessed that all he had intended was to make a picture that would “amuse myself” and please a young girl who hid under the covers and asked her father to frighten...
Essays
Jan 7, 1997 — Vivre sa vie, made in 1962, was the fourth of Jean-Luc Godard’s films. He had so far turned out a gangster-movie knockoff (Breathless), a dark political picture (Le Petit soldat), and a sort-of-musical comedy (Une femme est une femme). Now...
Features
Aug 20, 2021 — The author of Velvet Was the Night pays tribute to the shockingly stripped-down, dread-inducing use of silence in Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterful neonoir.
Apr 22, 2014 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare and modern visual style perfectly complements this comic and soulful domestic comeuppance story.
Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.
Jun 30, 2020 — Come and See (1985) is one of those films whose authority is established from its opening moments. Out in the open air, an elderly peasant dressed in a soft-peaked beret is volleying a mixture of threats and imprecations into some...
Sep 23, 2016 — Did You See This? To celebrate the beginning of autumn this week, the BFI has published a list of ten films set during the season, including Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, Wes Anderson’s Rushmore,...