The Criterion Collection
Dec 11, 2012 — The climate change expert discusses how Godfrey Reggio’s films presaged widespread concern about global warming and warned about the dangers of consumerism.
Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.
Jan 11, 2011 — His most personal film as well as the final one to deal with the German occupation of France, Jean-Pierre Melville’s thriller showcases human consciousness grappling with mortality.
Essays
Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s ingenious tale of Viennese cafe society conveys both the transience of individual passions and the durability of passion itself as a motivating force in human behavior.
Jul 9, 2007 — The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker,...
Essays
May 22, 2006 — Luis Buñuel’s merciless satire concerns the smallness of our vision of progress and our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning.
Essays
Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.
Nov 19, 2001 — Luis Buñuel’s drama is a seductive work that exemplifies, even as it studies, the perversity of human desire.
Essays
Dec 2, 1990 — In Martin Scorsese’s hands, the camera is not simply a recording device, but an x-ray machine—and it shows us close-ups of the human soul.
Jul 14, 2026 — On October 30, 1992, the Provisional Irish Republican Army set off two bombs as part of an ongoing campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland. One, a small explosive planted alarmingly close to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing...