The Criterion Collection
Essays
Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.
Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.
Feb 14, 2013 — David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s textbook Film Art, a cornerstone of the cinema studies discipline, was first published in 1979 and is now in a tenth edition. Over the years, some sections have been taken out, either to make room...
Feb 12, 2013 — The Dardenne brothers return to the streets of Seraing for a typically humane and suspenseful story of personal redemption.
Essays
Jan 22, 2013 — With his unique use of new 3D technology, Wim Wenders found an unprecedented way for the movie camera to capture bodies in space.
Sneak Peeks
Jan 8, 2013 — In Monte Hellman’s hypnotic road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, folk singer James Taylor gives a lead performance that is both unassuming and arresting, the kind of askew, unshowy, vanity-free acting that perhaps only a nonprofessional actor is capable of. As the...
Dec 11, 2012 — Philip Glass’s experimental operas and symphonic works of the 1960s and ’70s laid the groundwork for his hypnotic Qatsi scores.
Dec 11, 2012 — Cinema is both an educational tool and a vessel for kinetic, avant-garde expression for filmmaker and activist Godfrey Reggio.
Oct 16, 2012 — After breaking out with Maria Full of Grace, filmmaker Joshua Marston visited a strange new land with persistent and deadly traditions.
Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...