The Criterion Collection
Jan 20, 2018 — “American Animals is nothing if not a movie that arrives at some very simple truths in the hardest way possible,” writes IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. “A slick, well-acted, and intensely self-reflexive docudrama from the director of The Impostor, [Bart] Layton’s first...
Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.
Jan 11, 2011 — Given the scarcity of information available in the sixties, director Byron Haskin did a remarkable job of representing some of the conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, nearly a year before the first close-up views of the real Martian surface.
Features
Aug 6, 2019 — Once, in 1977, Werner Herzog read a news item about a volcano that was supposed to erupt in Guadeloupe and one man living there who refused to evacuate with the rest of the island’s population. Herzog being Herzog, he immediately...
Feb 17, 2014 — Flailing fathers, anxious mothers, and their moody offspring—these characters may have tails, but they’re Wes Anderson people through and through.
Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...
Nov 18, 2010 — In Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, terror and tenderness grapple with each other as profoundly as the words HATE and LOVE when they’re tattooed, one per hand, across the knuckles of the sadistic preacher Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum)....
Essays
Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.
Dec 4, 2006 — I had said that I was going to write about growing up with a projector in my attic, and Peter’s writing about home last week brought back some memories. Movies were cool. In the late sixties, my father would bring...
The Daily
Mar 20, 2026 — This week: Thierry Frémaux on the Lumière brothers, Lynne Littman and Jane Alexander on Testament, and Christian Petzold on Hitchcock.