The Criterion Collection
Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...
Essays
Mar 15, 2004 — This Japanese classic’s guiding passion is hunger, and its central image—a gaping black hole in the earth—is that of an all-consuming maw.
Production Notes
May 25, 2021 — 1. William Lindsay Gresham’s first book—the sordid carnival-sideshow noir Nightmare Alley—was the author’s only considerable literary success. A controversial best seller upon its publication in 1946, the novel was quickly followed by a film adaptation the next year. Gresham would...
Dec 6, 2016 — This elegiac meditation on impermanence showcases Laurie Anderson’s playfully experimental approach to sound and image.
Dec 10, 2013 — Djibril Diop Mambety’s Senegalese masterwork is remarkable for both its technical audacity and its postcolonialist expressionism.
Short Takes
Aug 16, 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 the results....
Jan 31, 2005 — Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel...
Nov 1, 2018 — Art director Richard Holland shares the nitty-gritty of how he constructed the infernal torture device in Rob Reiner’s classic fairy tale.
On the Channel
Jan 20, 2026 — This month, leap into a century of cinema’s greatest stunts, feel the ache of thwarted romance and bittersweet yearning, or get into trouble with the Depression-era hustlers of Mervyn LeRoy’s pre-Code films.