In Gefahr und größter Not bringt der Mittelweg den Tod

Nov 13, 2014 — Michael Lennick, visual effects supervisor, writer, filmmaker, self described sci-fi geek, and friend of the Criterion Collection, died last week in Toronto. Early in his career, Michael created special video effects for David Cronenberg’s films Videodrome and The Dead Zone....

With its unbridled frontier violence, themes of civilization versus savagery, and iconographic cowboy figure, the western is the most beloved and recognizable of American cinematic genres.

Oct 28, 2014 — We were so thrilled to have the privilege of interviewing The Vanishing director George Sluizer at his home in France in May of this year. In this clip from that discussion, the entirety of which can be found on our...

Oct 27, 2014 — In this excerpt from a 2005 Criterion interview, filmmaker and writer Peter Bogdanovich offers a lucid introduction to Orson Welles’s cryptic F for Fake, the delightful sort-of documentary that takes as its subjects art forger Elmyr de Hory, Howard Hughes’s...

Oct 22, 2014 — In a fascinating 1963 audio interview featured on our new release of La dolce vita, actor Marcello Mastroianni talks to film historian Gideon Bachmann about how he met Federico Fellini and was cast in La dolce vita. This disarmingly personal excerpt...

Oct 17, 2014 — In the following rare production footage, Roman Polanski directs a scene from his visceral, breathtaking 1971 film version of Macbeth. The particularly challenging set piece he is creating depicts the crucial moment when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane Hill, realizing...

Oct 8, 2014 — Eraserhead is a dark movie—literally. In this excerpt from a new interview on our special edition release of the film, director of photography Frederick Elmes discusses David Lynch’s approach to lighting his high-contrast black-and-white breakthrough, which you sometimes have to...

Oct 7, 2014 — In this five-minute excerpt from our new hour-long documentary Toil and Trouble: Making “Macbeth,” director Roman Polanski talks about the freedom adapting Shakespeare allows a filmmaker, and his unusual choice to cast young, physically attractive actors in the main roles....

Sep 30, 2014 — When we first released Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul in 2003, we asked filmmaker Todd Haynes to provide a video introduction. The year before, he had released his masterful Far from Heaven, a reworking of Douglas Sirk’s...

Sep 29, 2014 — The great cinematographer Freddie Francis’s brilliant work on Jack Clayton’s chilling 1961 horror movie The Innocents is widely admired by movie lovers and professionals. For an appreciation of this film’s incredible visuals, we turned to cinematographer John Bailey (The Big...