The Criterion Collection
Sep 22, 2020 — Francesco Rosi’s film Christ Stopped at Eboli (1979) is based on Carlo Levi’s novelistic memoir of the same name, which became an instant classic of Italian literature when it appeared at the end of World War II, in 1945. In...
Features
Nov 11, 2019 — Dark Passages I. Vacancy All the rooms are the same. There is always a skeletal bedstead with an uninviting mattress; a scuffed chest of drawers; a grimy little sink; a naked light bulb; bare walls on which the memory of...
Oct 29, 2019 — Matewan opens in the pitch-black darkness of a West Virginia coal mine. A miner lights the carbide lamp on his helmet. The small open flame he wears provides the only flicker of light in this cramped space next to a...
Essays
Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...
Essays
Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s dynamic, intricately madcap movie is a multitoned send-up of samurai film lore.
Jun 13, 2005 — Ernst Lubitsch was a big-city director. The historical dramas that he made in Germany in the late 1910s and early 1920s were known around the world for their distinctively urbane approach, focusing on the private lives of public people. This...
On the Channel
Dec 17, 2025 — This January, savor multiple levels of nostalgia with a survey of ’90s cinema’s riffs on the ’70s, or turn a new page with a collection of films about dreamers seeking fresh starts in life.
Aug 29, 2012 — With humor and melancholy, Franc Roddam’s coming-of-age drama, based on the Who’s iconic album, shows us a g-g-generation on the edge.
Essays
Nov 27, 2018 — With The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles created a model of period filmmaking, lightly deploying historical signifiers while focusing on the haunting power of his actors’ faces.
On the Channel
Feb 25, 2021 — Channel Calendars Giddy up, movie lovers! This month on the Channel, our Black Westerns series leads the charge, highlighting films that have challenged the myths of the Old West to tell the stories of African Americans on the frontier. And...