The Criterion Collection
Jul 2, 2009 — This week, Agnès Varda’s beguiling new film, the autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnès, makes its U.S. premiere at New York’s Film Forum, and for the occasion A. O. Scott has profiled the indefatigable eighty-one-year-old auteur in a splendid article...
Essays
Jul 21, 2008 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s elliptical and dreamlike vampire film defies definitive shots at interpretation.
Oct 31, 2007 — After the mugginess of the New York City summer, and with the launch of the new Criterion web store and the New York Film Festival keeping us all plenty busy through the end of September, Western Australia was a breath...
Sep 12, 2007 — Here’s a Criterion discussion that won’t die. It has to do with Berlin Alexanderplatz, and it came up again this week, thanks to a couple of customers writing in. We were standing there in a clump outside our production manager’s...
Essays
Jul 11, 2005 — Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story balances realism and fantasy.
Mar 14, 2005 — The first time I put an eye behind a camera (a 16mm Bell & Howell), it was in a lunatic asylum. The head of the institution was a great big hulk of a man with a face so ravaged by...
Essays
Jun 21, 1999 — Despite what you may have heard, Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion. (It was no surprise to me to learn...
Jan 11, 2019 — With 24 Frames, the film that would become his last, Abbas Kiarostami made one of the most conceptually daring—and painstaking—works of his career. Over the course of several years, the Iranian filmmaker hunkered down with visual effects supervisor Ali Kamali...
Apr 9, 2025 — Take a look at some of the memorable moments we have shared with movie lovers since the Mobile Closet launched last fall.