The Criterion Collection
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
Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...
May 27, 2026 — When Joachim Trier made his debut in 2006 with the film Reprise, I felt as if a veil had been lifted. There was nothing wrong with Norwegian cinema before Trier’s arrival, but it always seemed to be about someone else,...
Essays
Mar 17, 2026 — In her first and only theatrical feature, director Lynne Littman presents an unbearably intimate vision of apocalypse, focusing on the effects of a nuclear blast on one suburban American family.
Feb 24, 2026 — For this existential noir, Joel and Ethan Coen drew inspiration from crime-fiction master James M. Cain’s lean, hard-boiled style and interest in the quotidian world of work.
The Daily
Dec 4, 2024 — For the New York Film Critics Circle, Brady Corbet’s third feature is the best film of the year, but not everyone agrees.
Features
Sep 20, 2024 — With their virtuosic celebrations of death, giallo films reflect the air of paranoia and fear that haunted Italian society in the 1960s and ’70s, a period when the country was undergoing dramatic, violent changes.
Aug 28, 2024 — Albert Brooks and Debbie Reynolds are at their comedic best in this tale of parent-child bonding filled with Oedipal humor and emotional insight.
Essays
Oct 17, 2023 — I. “Morbid Cinema” On October 10, 1962, there appeared a brief paragraph from the Associated Press: “Tod Browning, eighty-two, who directed scores of movies between 1917 and 1939, is dead. He succumbed Saturday after an illness, and no funeral plans...
The Daily
Nov 29, 2022 — Everything Everywhere All at Once scores Best Feature and the Outstanding Supporting Performance award for Ke Huy Quan.