The First Time

Oct 7, 2015 — It’s night in the desert. Mike (River Phoenix), a teenage hustler given to bouts of narcolepsy, and Scott (Keanu Reeves), a slumming preppy prince, are huddled over a campfire. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The...

May 18, 2015 — Director and movie maven extraordinaire Peter Bogdanovich sat down with us in 2009 to talk about Leo McCarey’s masterful Hollywood weepie Make Way for Tomorrow. Since we released the film on Blu-ray for the first time last week, we thought...

Apr 6, 2015 — In 2004 and 2005, the makers of Hoop Dreams, in collaboration with Criterion, revisited the documentary’s principle figures, Arthur Agee and William Gates, along with their families, to see what had been happening in their lives since the film’s premiere...

Feb 20, 2015 — In time for this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, we wanted to celebrate all the incredible women who have been nominated for best actress Oscars for their roles in Criterion titles. They range from the 1930s to the 2010s, and include...

Dec 10, 2014 — Social satire, women’s melodrama, queer metaphor, or horror movie? Todd Haynes’s elusive masterpiece is all of these and none of them.

Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.

Sep 16, 2014 — The following interview is from filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s 1997 book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews in the book were conducted by Rodley between January 1993 and December 1996. Eraserhead took five years to complete. You must have been...

Aug 26, 2014 — Define the Japanese New Wave however you like—there are innumerable possible launching points, and the name players in the fifties and sixties were old and young and in between—but from any juncture, Shohei Imamura was a primary figure and, at...

Jul 8, 2014 — For our release of Howard Hawks’s Red River, we asked the legendary director and writer Peter Bogdanovich to share his thoughts on the film, which he ranks as one of his favorites. (He once called it “the best epic western...

Jun 25, 2014 — Hearts and Minds is the classic antiwar documentary film of the Vietnam era. It was released in 1974, one year after the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam and a year before North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front...