The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...
May 11, 2021 — Dorothy Arzner’s deeply cynical portrait of marriage exemplifies the director’s ambivalence toward the norms dictating female behavior, wielding ironic detachment to mask one woman’s simmering inner turmoil.
Features
Jun 8, 2022 — A major figure in contemporary Hindi literature pays tribute to Guru Dutt in this fantasia that reimagines the great filmmaker’s death.
Jul 23, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.
Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.
The Daily
Sep 28, 2026 — Shirley Clarke, Orson Welles, George Cukor, Lynne Ramsay, Olivier Assayas, Bree Daniels . . . quite a roundup this month.
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.
On the Channel
Feb 18, 2026 — Among this month’s highlights are a celebration of VHS and how it revolutionized film culture, a spotlight on the Romanian New Wave, and a retrospective of pioneering queer filmmaker Monika Treut.
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.
The Daily
Oct 20, 2025 — The Mexican director’s oeuvre, spanning half a century, is undeniably dark but also deeply humane.