The Criterion Collection
Features
Jan 15, 2017 — To make the performance of a tedious, exacting, time-consuming task riveting to watch, it is only necessary for the activity to be illegal.
Sep 27, 2016 — This monumental meditation on the Ten Commandments captures the spiritual undercurrents of life in late-Communist Poland.
Short Takes
Sep 15, 2016 — Need some respite from the twenty-four-hour news cycle? Bill Hader and Fred Armisen’s hysterical IFC Channel series Documentary Now! returns with some comedic salve for our weary election-season souls.
Jun 28, 2016 — When Stanley Kubrick bought the motion picture rights to the 1958 thriller Red Alert, by the retired Royal Air Force navigator Peter George, he meant to direct an action film about a nuclear war triggered by a solitary madman. Some...
Apr 26, 2016 — “It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today—the art of candid observation—didn’t exist,” writes Thom Powers.
Mar 29, 2016 — Les Blank’s long-lost documentary revels in the trippy, eccentric world of and surrounding Tulsa Sound pioneer Leon Russell, transforming what might have been a standard concert movie into a genuine work of art.
Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.
Dec 29, 2015 — Kitchen Conversations“I almost have the impression that films come by themselves and you’re like a slave to them—one of them decides to go for it, and you run after it,” said director Deniz Gamze Ergüven when she and her eight-month-old...
Nov 24, 2015 — In Dont Look Back, legendary documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker employs his revolutionary new camera and Direct Cinema style to capture the multiple essences and contradictions of a young Bob Dylan making his way across England in 1965.
Nov 18, 2015 — Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood applied cinematic specificity and flair to the literary realism of Truman Capote’s classic “nonfiction novel.”