The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 2, 1991 — Director Akira Kurosawa had wanted to make Throne of Blood for some time. “After finishing Rashomon [in 1950] I wanted to do something with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but just about that time Orson Welles’s version was announced, so I postponed mine.”...
Jan 28, 1991 — The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Pauline Kael. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in...
The Daily
Oct 16, 2026 — Metropolis and John Berger turn one hundred, Daisies is sixty, and the future is closing in.
The Daily
Oct 6, 2026 — This week is packed with festival openings, special screenings, series, and retrospectives.
The Daily
Sep 29, 2026 — The body-swap mystery stumped more than a few viewers in Cannes, but it seems to have found its footing in New York.
Sep 29, 2026 — With their mix of comedy, ecstasy, and aesthetic strangeness, the French auteur’s first three features grant us access to psychic states that we might not otherwise be able to enter.
The Daily
Sep 28, 2026 — Shirley Clarke, Orson Welles, George Cukor, Lynne Ramsay, Olivier Assayas, Bree Daniels . . . quite a roundup this month.
Sep 28, 2026 — Anchored by an extraordinary performance from Sandrine Bonnaire, the epic historical drama Joan the Maid strips away its saintly protagonist’s mythic aura and gives us a humbler, more intimate version of her life story.
Sep 23, 2026 — Kleber Mendonça Filho explores the elisions of history and memory in this splendidly polymorphous thriller about a man on the run in 1977 Brazil.
Sep 21, 2026 — A Japanese-television phenomenon that sparked a boom in anime production and fandom, Hideaki Anno’s magnum opus is a mind-bending mix of kinetic action, sci-fi spectacle, and introspective human drama.