The Criterion Collection
May 11, 2015 — The poignancy of Leo McCarey's tearjerker is due as much to the director's scrupulous aesthetic choices as his unforgettable characters and story.
Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...
Essays
Aug 4, 2014 — Rebellious children of the sixties become conflicted consumers of the eighties in Lawrence Kasdan’s elegiac comedy-drama.
Jul 22, 2014 — Jeanne Moreau’s flighty, enigmatic Jackie in Jacques Demy’s poetic drama is in the great tradition of dreamy Demy heroines.
Jun 17, 2014 — The brutal lessons of Vietnam remained in America’s national consciousness for a generation. September 11 gave us collective amnesia, and they’ve had to be learned again.
Apr 14, 2014 — Lars von Trier brought his brand of provocation to his widest audience yet with this inquiry into faith and human goodness.
Mar 11, 2014 — Presenting five poor, black and white North Carolina preteens as they awaken to love and death, George Washington (2000) tells a common adolescent story, yet the film is distinguished by the poetic, ruminative style of its twenty-five-year-old director, David Gordon...
Production Notes
Mar 5, 2014 — A few years ago, as I was collaborating on the Criterion release of Last Year at Marienbad, I had the chance to meet Alain Resnais. We had released Hiroshima mon amour and Night and Fog a few years earlier, and...
Essays
Feb 28, 2014 — Other first films exude the sparkling joy of filmmaking that one feels in Breathless, but how many can boast its sure-handedness?
Essays
Jan 7, 2014 — Satyajit Ray was ailing when he made them, but these three works from the great filmmaker’s final years show an artist at the height of his powers.