The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 19, 2016 — In Whit Stillman’s second feature, cousins Fred and Ted Boynton (Chris Eigeman and Taylor Nichols) navigate an occasionally hostile culture and their own late transitions to adulthood.
In Theaters
Dec 29, 2015 — One refrain often heard in discussions of twenty-first-century film culture is a lament for the loss of social film viewing. While we celebrate the fact that digital technologies have given us convenient access to unprecedented numbers of movies, old and...
Jul 28, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s first full-fledged storybook fantasy challenges and subverts traditional fairy-tale norms.
Jun 10, 2014 — Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was...
Dec 10, 2013 — Djibril Diop Mambety’s Senegalese masterwork is remarkable for both its technical audacity and its postcolonialist expressionism.
Essays
Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...
Short Takes
Aug 29, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...
Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...
Jan 18, 2012 — Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarating works themselves as a Marxist harangue in...
Dec 6, 2011 — Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living (1933) is what sexy should be—delightful, romantic, agonizing ecstasy. And it’s not just sexy but also revolutionary, daring, sweet, sour, cynical, carefree, poignant, and so far ahead of its time that one could cite it...