The Criterion Collection
Production Notes
Jul 7, 2016 — In honor of the director, we look back at his quintessentially American narratives.
Essays
Jun 30, 2016 — In Olivier Assayas’s 2014 film Clouds of Sils Maria, Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart play out a story centered on the complexities of female relationships, the making and undoing of boundaries between people, and our anxieties about the passage of...
Features
Jun 29, 2016 — In this essay, first published in Grand Street in 1994, Dr. Strangelove coscreenwriter Terry Southern offers a lively behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production.
Jun 28, 2016 — When Stanley Kubrick bought the motion picture rights to the 1958 thriller Red Alert, by the retired Royal Air Force navigator Peter George, he meant to direct an action film about a nuclear war triggered by a solitary madman. Some...
Jun 22, 2016 — In honor of the semicentennial anniversary of Kartemquin Films, the influential documentarian discusses his groundbreaking, Kartemquin-produced 1994 film Hoop Dreams, what his work with the company has meant for him, and how Kartemquin has grown over the past fifty years.
Jun 7, 2016 — Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1955 feature about a group of Turinese women plays on the themes of the novel it was adapted from, while showcasing the developing style of the soon-to-be legendary director.
Essays
May 24, 2016 — In The Player, Robert Altman’s early nineties comeback film, the director brilliantly skewers Hollywood—getting all the details right, as only he could—while constructing his own kind of Hollywood Movie.
Apr 26, 2016 — “It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today—the art of candid observation—didn’t exist,” writes Thom Powers.
Sneak Peeks
Apr 14, 2016 — Before he became one of cinema’s greatest directors, Howard Hawks was a pilot for the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War I. And in the years following the war, Hawks took advantage of his flying expertise and the public’s...
Apr 12, 2016 — Howard Hawks’s 1939 aviation classic Only Angels Have Wings is an exemplar of the auteurist Hollywood entertainer’s capability to fuse “a personal existential statement and a delightful piece of showmanship.”