The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 6, 2014 — This humorous magazine piece from 1970 sheds some light on the meaning of the title of Il sorpasso, along with the way Vittorio Gassman comports himself behind the wheel in it.
Oct 22, 2013 — This delicately creepy Hollywood horror movie lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre.
Essays
Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.
Feb 11, 2008 — Though today he is most fondly remembered for his later romantic comedies, typifying Hollywood filmmaking in its heyday, it should be known that Ernst Lubitsch was also a pioneer of the modern movie musical.
Apr 28, 2026 — As the 1950s began, Kinuyo Tanaka found herself at a turning point. She had been acting in films since she was fourteen, becoming one of Japan’s most beloved, admired, and prolific women stars. Now in her early forties, she saw...
May 20, 2025 — A film about and against everything, this astonishingly original comedy attacks Big Brother, the bomb, and the incipient collapse of our planetary ecosystem, along with the lies that stop us from recognizing all of the above.
Oct 15, 2024 — This jolt of delicious weirdness from Japanese New Wave master Masahiro Shinoda is both a reverent salute to Kabuki and a self-consciously postmodern take on its traditions.
Aug 28, 2020 — One severe pan, a good handful of raves, and a set of fence-straddling reviews recommending that viewers go ahead and proceed—but with caution.
Jun 16, 2020 — Buster Keaton’s last great film, The Cameraman (1928), is his love letter to the machine that makes movies possible. He plays a humble street photographer who is smitten with a pretty secretary and follows her back to the newsreel office...
The Daily
Mar 3, 2018 — So this is the weekend that finally brings awards season to an end. The Film Independent Spirit Awards will be presented tonight (and here’s an overview of the nominations), and tomorrow’s the Big Night (again, the nominations). The one piece...