The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 23, 2017 — In his radical debut feature, Ousmane Sembène reveals the agony of the postcolonial experience through the story of a Senegalese migrant abused by her French employers.
On the Channel
Dec 13, 2016 — Yesterday, we kicked off our Criterion Channel series Spy Games by sharing Graham Greene's review of Jacques Feyder’s Knight Without Armour, a highlight in the lineup. Today, we’re focusing on another title in the series, Sabotage, which marked “the first...
In Theaters
Nov 17, 2016 — French cinema icon Isabelle Huppert takes the spotlight this weekend, as New York City’s Metrograph theater launches a mini-retrospective of her four-decade career.
Sep 1, 2016 — Balancing epic scale with lyrical intimacy, Orson Welles inflects the spirit of Shakespeare’s history plays with his own zest for cinematic invention.
Jun 21, 2016 — Animated in Czechoslovakia amid a Soviet invasion, the French film Fantastic Planet, the third collaboration between René Laloux and Roland Topor, timelessly renders its surreal sci-fi story of captivity and resistance.
Short Takes
Jan 27, 2016 — Last month, we were thrilled to release the late filmmaker Howard Brookner’s long-awaited documentary, Burroughs: The Movie. Shot over five years, from the late 1970s to the early ’80s, the critically praised film offers an intimate glimpse into the life...
Nov 4, 2015 — In the midst of a tumultuous period in his life and career, Ingmar Bergman made one of his most ebullient comedies.
Jul 17, 2015 — As visually and sociopolitically expansive as it is intimate in its details of a boy’s coming of age, Jan Troell’s film is one of the great cinematic debuts.
Feb 28, 2014 — The Great Beauty, which is up for best foreign-language film at Sunday’s Academy Awards, feels at times like a glorious throwback to a time when art-house cinema reigned. Feeling nostalgic for that era, when films by the great directors of world...
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?