The Criterion Collection
Nov 21, 2005 — Why would ambitious filmmakers simply film an opera? Many admirers of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have assumed that their decision to make The Tales of Hoffmann, in 1950, was in some way an admission by the...
Mar 13, 2004 — With uncharacteristic warmth and affection for human frailty, Ingmar Bergman raises the question of how love can possibly last forever.
Essays
Nov 23, 1999 — The occasion of the 100th anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s birth rewards us with a new release of one of his greatest films, The 39 Steps (1935). This DVD provides a newly restored transfer, new critical audio commentary on the film,...
Essays
Nov 22, 1999 — Grand Illusion is the masterpiece that earned Jean Renoir enormous acclaim in the United States, exciting the admiration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and running for 26 weeks in New York after its opening in September 1938. Banned in Italy...
Essays
Oct 19, 1998 — Jean-Luc Godard’s stripped-down science-fiction drama depicts a computer-controlled society at war with artists, thinkers, and lovers.
Essays
Jul 14, 1998 — Adirector who knows his genres, Jonathan Demme has never been able to resist turning them inside out. Starting in the film industry as a publicist, Demme was soon hired by Roger Corman as a scriptwriter and then as a director....
Essays
May 25, 1992 — Cecil B. DeMille’s spectacle turned out to be the silent screen’s most elaborate realization of “the greatest story ever told.”
Jul 22, 2009 — Made in 1966 (so quickly that it could almost be considered an improvisation), Jean-Luc Godard’s twelfth feature is arguably the most quintessentially “Godardian” of the filmmaker’s early period— but for those of us in the United States, it is also...
Sep 16, 2025 — A portrait of a new generation of feminist consciousness in the New York art world, Lizzie Borden’s first film project spikes with a persistent friction between the filmmaker and her documentary subjects.