Work It

Aug 14, 2020 — One Scene Over the course of an adventurous career that encompassed narrative and documentary filmmaking as well as photography, sculpture, and video installation, Agnès Varda was a shape-shifter who merged her deep engagement with social reality with a playful, endlessly...

Mar 27, 2020 — The cost to the Soviet population due to the war with Germany from 1941 to 1945 has not been definitively established; the best-circulated estimate, about twenty-seven million, is thought by some scholars to be low by many millions. Under Joseph...

Sep 11, 2019 — Following his landmark collection of photographs, The Americans, Frank made essential films about the Beats, the Stones, and his own personal tragedies.

Jul 8, 2019 — With his incomparable adaptation of War and Peace, filmmaker Sergei Bondarchuk sought to surpass King Vidor’s 1956 big-budget Hollywood spin on Leo Tolstoy’s novel in dramatic heft and dazzling spectacle, a task in which he certainly succeeded. Over the course...

Apr 22, 2019 — When Criterion art director Eric Skillman reached out to me with the opportunity to work on Diamonds of the Night, he started with the statement “I couldn’t get your new work out of my head as I watched the film.”...

Apr 1, 2019 — The artist, photographer, and filmmaker leaves behind one of the most varied and restless oeuvres in cinema.

Nov 23, 2018 — The work of James Agee (1909–1955) remains one of the touchstones of American movie criticism. An extraordinarily versatile writer, he won acclaim as a novelist, a poet, and a screenwriter (his scripts for The African Queen and The Night of the...

Sep 13, 2018 — The imitation of nature becomes a devotional act in Terrence Malick’s cinema, which reaches sublime heights in this exploration of childhood, memory, and grief.

Sep 10, 2018 — One of the pleasures of programming a new short-and-feature pairing every week on the Criterion Channel is getting to celebrate the artistic freedom that short films offer emerging artists. With tighter run times and smaller budgets, the form comes with...

Apr 18, 2018 — Before we lost Milos Forman and Vittorio Taviani over the weekend, the Slovak Spectator reported that Juraj Herz, the Czech actor and director best known for his 1968 film The Cremator, had passed away at the age of eighty-three. Just...