The Criterion Collection
Oct 23, 2012 — After winning an Oscar, John Schlesinger used his newfound artistic freedom to make a personal film in which homosexuality is treated as groundbreakingly ordinary.
Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...
Oct 12, 2010 — One Every movie is two stories: the one it tells and the one that remains to be told about it by those involved in its creation. These two narratives converge in a certain current of the cinema of the past...
Apr 27, 2009 — The idea of making a film about Japan’s most famous sex crime, with a decent budget and in conditions of complete freedom, reawakened Nagisa Oshima’s desire to direct—and the prospect of circumventing Japanese censorship must have made the decision even...
Oct 22, 2007 — Through the alcohol-induced convulsive movements of Firmin, a fallen diplomat, John Huston puts what is perhaps his own fear of decline, of departure without making peace with one’s loved ones, on the screen.
Essays
May 21, 2007 — Carol Reed’s masterpiece dives deep into the life and mind of screenwriter Graham Greene, one of Britain’s greatest postwar novelist.
Aug 26, 2025 — Alice Wu’s feature debut is a romantic comedy in which the most compelling relationship is the one between a young queer Chinese American woman and her long-widowed mother.
Jan 5, 2016 — Toshiya Fujita’s two-film saga set exuberant, manga-inspired martial-arts choreography against a backdrop of a Japanese society in transition to unfold a vivid tale of epic vengeance.
Aug 14, 2006 — The appearance of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales in the midst of the sixties’ sexual revolution brought unexpected sobriety to the European sexual drama and the comedy of erotic manners. Their stateside popularity successfully challenged the sauciness and candor audiences were...
The Daily
Oct 24, 2023 — The season brings Barbra Streisand’s memories, the “joyously vulgar” Burton and Taylor, and the story of Siskel and Ebert.