Film

Feb 22, 2016 — Although he wasn’t the first child actor to gain recognition, Jackie Coogan outstripped all his peers in popularity when, at the tender age of six, he starred opposite Charlie Chaplin in the 1921 silent masterpiece The Kid. He delivers a...

Feb 5, 2016 — The Emigrants and The New Land, the incredible pair of films made by Swedish director Jan Troell in the early 1970s, remain among the most authentic and powerful portrayals of the mid-nineteenth-century wave of emigration from Europe to the United...

Jan 14, 2016 — For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders had his...

Dec 11, 2015 — With his singular and unwavering style, Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu disregarded the established rules of cinema and created a visual language all his own. Precise compositions, contemplative pacing, low camera angles, and elliptical storytelling are just some of the signature...

Nov 25, 2015 — Last week, when John Waters stopped by Criterion for a visit, we asked the cult filmmaker (and connoisseur of holiday entertainment) for his recommendations of the films we should be watching this holiday season. Naturally, he responded with one of...

Nov 17, 2015 — Max von Sydow has spent the past six decades cultivating one of cinema’s most illustrious careers, and now, at eighty-seven, the Swedish actor “may be on the verge of becoming a pop-culture icon,” writes Terrence Rafferty in the Atlantic.

Nov 5, 2015 — Repertory PicksIn honor of the hundredth anniversary of Ingrid Bergman’s birth, the Loft Cinema in Tucson is currently hosting a monthlong celebration of the Swedish star's work entitled “The Films of Ingrid Bergman.” The series features five of her most...

Nov 1, 2015 — Forty years ago today, we lost Pier Paolo Pasolini—the celebrated Italian filmmaker, actor, poet, novelist, journalist, playwright, painter, and public intellectual. On November 2, 1975, Pasolini was found brutally murdered on a beach in Ostia, Italy, just weeks before the...

Oct 30, 2015 — Creating the design that graces our cover of Masaki Kobayashi’s haunting set of ghost stories involved inks, a tank of water, and a fair bit of ingenuity.

Oct 1, 2015 — Holy cow—the pope is a Criterion fan and he doesn’t even know it. As reported in Entertainment Weekly, during Pope Francis’s historic visit to the United States last week, the Prince Theatre in Philadelphia screened three films of which His...