The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 11, 2005 — Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story balances realism and fantasy.
Essays
May 24, 1999 — Before The Red Shoes, there were films with dance numbers. After it, there was a new medium which combined dance, design, and music in a dreamlike spectacle. Hollywood musicals were quick to pay tribute—An American in Paris was the most...
Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.
Feb 19, 2007 — For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, Mikio Naruse’s drama exhibits a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.
Jul 25, 2023 — In his five collaborations with actor Randolph Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown, Boetticher presents an unsentimental vision of honor-bound men competing and banding together in a desolate landscape ruled by chance.
Jan 3, 2023 — A work of pure, rigorous enchantment, the final film in Terry Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” employs old-fashioned technical wizardry to bring about its wall-to-wall visual astonishments.
May 22, 2019 — Everyone’s all in for the first two acts of this love letter to Los Angeles—but for many, the third is a deal-breaker.
Dec 13, 2016 — John Huston’s meticulously calibrated crime film combines nail-biting suspense with a mood of Chekhovian regret.
On the Channel
Sep 17, 2026 — Our Halloween programming includes a tour of cinema’s scariest road movies, an anthology of TV-movie nightmares, and collections built around our fears of sinister intruders and mysterious possessive forces.
Jun 18, 2026 — Over the course of his first three documentaries—Helvetica (2007), Objectified (2009), and Urbanized (2011)—Gary Hustwit established a clean and clear cinematic language that he used to describe the complex and often contradictory systems of thinking that designers use to shape...