He Was Once

Aug 1, 2016 — Back in January, veteran actor Keith Baxter stopped by the Criterion offices for lunch and regaled us with memories of his experience working with Orson Welles.

Jul 20, 2016 — In his staggeringly ambitious masterwork A Touch of Zen, Chinese filmmaker King Hu imbues dynamic scenes of combat with balletic grace and audacious stylistic experimentation.

Jul 18, 2016 — Criterion’s resident researcher and web producer takes a trip to Madrid bookstore Ocho y Medio, which she calls “a shrine to Spanish contributions to the seventh art.”

Jul 12, 2016 — Herk Harvey’s influential, low-budget horror classic Carnival of Souls is an eerie exploration of the mutability of place and the purgatorial state of dreaming.

Jul 7, 2016 — In honor of the director, we look back at his quintessentially American narratives.

Jul 5, 2016 — Arthur Hiller’s 1979 comedy pairs Alan Arkin and Peter Falk as unlikely comrades in a madcap farce that lands every laugh.

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...

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.