The Criterion Collection
Nov 12, 1990 — For a twenty-seven-year-old director with a smattering of television experience and only one prior feature, Steven Spielberg demonstrated an awesome mastery of the film medium when his first big production hit the screen in 1975. An instant and certifiable phenomenon,...
Essays
Feb 1, 1988 — Charles Laughton’s classic has the feel and the force of an American folk fable; yet, it also mixes rural humor with gothic humor, biblical quotation and Freudian symbolism, and everyday realities with a near-mythic confrontation between the forces of good...
Essays
Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.
Jul 7, 2010 — Frederick Elmes has served as cinematographer on some of the most acclaimed American movies of the past four decades, including Eraserhead, River’s Edge, Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Broken Flowers, and Synecdoche, New York. The films in the Criterion Collection...
The writer and director of Blue Heron shares how John Cassavetes inspired her own approach to independent filmmaking, praises The Watermelon Woman and Not a Pretty Picture as essential works of hybrid cinema, and talks about her personal connection to...
The influential cinematographer talks about films that informed his visual style, praises the complexity and simplicity of Yi Yi, and analyzes the opening sequence of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Blue.
The director of One False Move and Devil in a Blue Dress talks about his love of Yasujiro Ozu, the exploration of crime in Pixote, the inspiration he took from Children of Paradise, and one of the greatest jazz films...
May 12, 2025 — Constance Tsang is a Chinese American writer, director, and educator based in New York. Her first feature, Blue Sun Palace, was awarded the French Touch Prize by the jury at the 2024 Cannes Critics’ Week and was an official selection...
Short Takes
Mar 29, 2016 — Today, we’re celebrating the release on Blu-ray and DVD of Les Blank’s legendary Leon Russell music documentary A Poem Is a Naked Person. And while we’re on the topic of fascinating nonfiction filmmaking, we’re also taking a look at a...
On the Channel
Oct 18, 2019 — An intriguing paradox lies at the heart of Errol Morris’s body of work: while his films are driven by a relentless pursuit of knowledge and facts, they ultimately reveal cinema’s inability to capture a definitive version of reality. It’s this...