The Criterion Collection
Essays
Sep 28, 2022 — Cameroonian director Dikongué-Pipa’s debut feature is both a manifesto on cinema’s capacity to bring about social change and a celebration of love and its possibilities.
Sep 20, 2022 — The Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan’s strip-club-set drama is an intricate tapestry of grief and trauma, held together by a longing for human connection.
Mar 23, 2021 — “Pleasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is true when it comes to watching films. While cinema can be edifying, most of us go to the...
Jan 16, 2018 — The ravages of poverty in contemporary Britain are translated with vivid authenticity in this drama from celebrated filmmaker Ken Loach.
Criterion Designs
Jan 22, 2014 — When it came time to assemble the Criterion release of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, using Jack’s classic art was a no-brainer, and we were thrilled to find the man himself willing to revisit the film and provide...
Mar 27, 2012 — The mysterious letter was signed “Joe.” David Lean’s lawyer had sent me a batch of old correspondence. Struggling with a biography of Lean, I was desperate for any leads, and this one seemed worth following up. But how does one...
Jun 24, 2009 — The following tribute to Sacha Vierny by Alain Resnais (pictured together above, Resnais left) was published in the October 2001 issue of Positif. It is based on an interview conducted by François Thomas and was translated for Criterion by Nicholas...
Nov 30, 2006 — We've been all over the city in the past couple of days, lugging around the fourteen-pound Janus box in a prototype Janus tote, feeling a little like traveling salesmen, but it's okay, because Paris is just so beautiful, even on...
Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.
Features
Sep 13, 2004 — This oblique strategy can be seen as a self-referential characterization of Slacker itself: it appears to have no structure, to be chaotic (a matter of random encounters), when, in fact, it has a very subtle, extremely well-crafted structure that makes...