The Documentary

Nov 13, 2014 — Michael Lennick, visual effects supervisor, writer, filmmaker, self described sci-fi geek, and friend of the Criterion Collection, died last week in Toronto. Early in his career, Michael created special video effects for David Cronenberg’s films Videodrome and The Dead Zone....

Oct 21, 2014 — There were plenty of advantages to living in Paris in the early 1970s, especially if one was a movie buff with time on one’s hands. The Parisian film world is relatively small, and simply being on the fringes of it...

Oct 21, 2014 — As breakup songs go, “Dreaming My Dreams with You,” written by country stalwart Allen Reynolds, is a tear-jerking doozy. It first appeared on the 1975 Waylon Jennings album Dreaming My Dreams. And while it’s been covered pretty frequently, by singers...

Aug 11, 2014 — In 1983, during the production of John Cassavetes’s Love Streams, journalist Michael Ventura was hired by Cannon Films executive Menahem Golan to make a promotional documentary about the company’s first Cassavetes picture. The result was the sixty-minute “I’m Almost Not...

Jun 25, 2014 — Only a small fraction of the footage Peter Davis shot for Hearts and Minds made it into his 112-minute Academy Award­–winning documentary on the Vietnam War. Davis and his crew filmed hundreds of hours in the United States, Vietnam, and...

May 15, 2014 — It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that Overlord features some of the most unbelievable images in the entire Criterion Collection. This is because of the way director Stuart Cooper integrated archival footage from World War II battles into his fictional...

Mar 21, 2014 — The great documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has interviewed his share of daunting subjects, from former Secretary of Defense Robert NcNamara to the electric-chair technician Fred Leuchter Jr. (a.k.a. Mr. Death). But in this excerpt from an interview on our new...

Dec 6, 2013 — Ennio Morricone is known the world over for his instantly identifiable scores in such films as The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly; Once upon a Time in the West; and The Mission. He has composed hundreds of others, however,...

Apr 19, 2013 — Did You See This?• Mapping out the world of Wes Anderson • Cannes 2013—and away we go! • Kurosawa, Godard, Herzog, Milius—just your average hangout • John Lurie returns to the rod and the reel. • For the love of...

Nov 26, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...