The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 18, 2022 — Garrett Bradley warped the clock. In her masterwork Time (2020), the present is the past is the future—which is to say, the lie of linearity gets emptied. Virginia Woolf comes up, when I think of artists who have comparably seized...
Jan 12, 2022 — Gifted with the looks and suavity of a young Elvis, the “Wicked Game” crooner shares with David Lynch an obsession with 1950s Americana—and a knowledge of the darkness at its heart.
Dec 14, 2021 — In 1968, soon after he graduated from the Film and Television Institute of India, Mani Kaul made an arresting short titled Forms and Designs. It observes artisans at work across the country, some swimming alone against the tide of mass...
Nov 23, 2021 — The End In the end, it should not have come as any kind of surprise. When Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo dethroned Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) as the greatest film of all time in Sight & Sound magazine’s international poll of...
Nov 16, 2021 — Tsui Hark’s epic martial-arts saga revolutionized Hong Kong cinema by presenting a complex portrait of modern Chinese history and setting a gold standard in action choreography.
Nov 2, 2021 — Federico Fellini’s earliest masterpiece is a story of despair and optimism, cruelty and salvation, that occasioned the director’s ascent to stardom.
The Daily
Oct 20, 2021 — The range this month stretches from the silent era to this weekend’s launch of The Liberated Film Club.
The Daily
Oct 14, 2021 — Voir is “a new documentary series of visual essays celebrating cinema.”
Sep 30, 2021 — The Oscar-winning actor—whose one-hundredth birthday we’re celebrating on the Criterion Channel—embodied a mess of contradictions that have long been obscured by her reputation for unbending rectitude.
Essays
Sep 28, 2021 — The first Black-directed movie musical of the modern film era, Melvin Van Peebles’s drama illuminates the cultural and political concerns of working-class Black people with delight and fancy.