The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 26, 2026 — Of all the performing arts, stand-up comedy may be the most ephemeral, even more so if the humor is considered dangerous or taboo. Stand-up relies on the charged dynamic between a comedian and an audience, with both sides often bringing...
Feb 20, 2024 — I have, over time, become wary of and impatient with the word authentic, especially when it’s too casually and blithely deployed, as it often is these days, to defame or diminish someone or something based on arbitrary standards of what...
Apr 19, 2022 — Frank Tashlin directs Jayne Mansfield to her cartoonish limits in this outrageous showbiz satire that is a testament to the power of bad taste.
The Daily
Nov 19, 2020 — This month, we’re sorting through new books featuring—for starters—Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras, Billy Wilder, Geraldine Chaplin, and Harmony Korine.
The Daily
Sep 2, 2020 — Festival directors join Venice head Alberto Barbera, who encourages the industry to get back up and running again.
Essays
Oct 17, 2017 — In this lavishly mounted epic, Stanley Kubrick captures the ghostly ephemerality of a vanishing world with paradoxical immediacy.
The Daily
Aug 8, 2017 — In Jan Speckenbach’s “intriguing, sincere, if somewhat overreaching sophomore feature,” Freedom, “Nora (Johanna Wokalek) wanders past Breugel’s Tower of Babel painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, while in Berlin, unaware of her whereabouts, her lawyer husband Philip (a sympathetic...
Nov 6, 1989 — If you had to choose one movie to have with you while stranded on an island, the choice might well be Lawrence of Arabia. Considered by many as one of the greatest films ever made, it received seven Academy Awards...
Aug 3, 2015 — On film noir’s unparalleled roster of resonant titles—Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, and Where Danger Lives, to name three—none is more emblematic or iconographically cogent than Night and the City. Juxtaposing two of noir’s essential, virtually ontological qualities,...
The Daily
Jan 4, 2023 — New York’s Film Forum presents three recently restored short films that capture the writer in Istanbul, Paris, and London.