The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 14, 2014 — Jules Dassin’s atmospheric, genre-defining heist thriller combines American virtuosity with French cool.
Features
May 22, 2020 — Walking, like breathing, is something we do without thinking, an activity so common that pedestrian has as its second meaning uninspired, ordinary, dull. But when this action appears in a movie, it is revealed as more than the original mode...
Essays
Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.
Feb 28, 2023 — In his directorial debut, Robert Townsend channeled his frustrations with the typecasting of Black actors, resulting in a satire whose hilarious critique of Hollywood still resonates today.
Jan 13, 2016 — In Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis focused his lens on the world of Italy’s female rice workers, for a story that’s part social commentary, part pulp melodrama—and introduced the world to a dazzling young actress named Silvana Mangano.
Feb 1, 2018 — G. W. Pabst’s breathlessly paced reimagining of a mine disaster makes an urgent plea for international cooperation in the post–World War I era.
Feb 16, 2004 — In this quintessential noir, Samuel Fuller breaks with the Red Scare formula of his contemporaries by contrasting the faceless evil of Communism against the peccadilloes of the workaday American crook.
Aug 19, 2013 — This moving drama about gender, race, and class in 1960s Kolkata is a pioneering work from Satyajit Ray.
Jun 9, 2026 — Over the course of four decades, the great Mauritanian French filmmaker Med Hondo created a stylistically diverse, politically trenchant body of work that frequently tapped into his own Pan-African roots and explored the existential and material stresses of Black people...
Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...