The Moromete Family

Dec 5, 2014 — A film about garlic? Only Les Blank could pull it off. In this clip from a new supplement on our release Les Blank: Always for Pleasure, we get the story of how Blank’s pungent documentary Garlic Is as Good as...

Dec 5, 2014 — Earlier this week, we had a party for the release of our new book, Criterion Designs, at the Society of Illustrators in New York. Our friend the filmmaker :: kogonada brought the following video, in which Criterion artwork comes to...

Dec 3, 2014 — “We were just in London, clubbing, all those things people did in the ’60s in the middle of London,” British actor Francesca Annis recalls, in an interview on the new Criterion release of Macbeth, of “crossing paths” with director Roman...

Dec 2, 2014 — Les Blank’s documentaries focusing on musicians are wonderfully easygoing and authentic. Watching films like A Well Spent Life, a 1971 portrait of Texas blues guitarist Mance Lipscomb, one senses a relationship of total trust between subjects and filmmakers. In this...

Dec 1, 2014 — Agroup of rich Italians is on a cruise off the coast of Sicily when one of their number—a moody, unhappy young woman—disappears. Murder, kidnapping, accident, suicide? Her boyfriend and her close friend search for her, but the search turns into...

Nov 26, 2014 — The famous Franky & Johnny’s is just one of many places in New Orleans you can get crawfish, a city specialty. But it’s the only one that Les Blank turned to when he was making Always for Pleasure, his invigorating...

Nov 25, 2014 — Features Director Michelangelo Antonioni made these famous remarks at the press conference following the May 1960 Cannes Film Festival premiere of L’avventura. They appear here in a translation published in the spring 1962 issue of the journal Film Culture. Today...

Nov 24, 2014 — There are few greater admirers of the late documentarian Les Blank than the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog. (The two were already close when Blank filmed the making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo for Burden of Dreams.) So we knew we wanted...

Nov 21, 2014 — Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night would seem to have all the earmarks of the great Hollywood genre the screwball comedy, but the jury has long been out on whether it can be classified that way, as it was released...

Nov 13, 2014 — Michael Lennick, visual effects supervisor, writer, filmmaker, self described sci-fi geek, and friend of the Criterion Collection, died last week in Toronto. Early in his career, Michael created special video effects for David Cronenberg’s films Videodrome and The Dead Zone....