The Criterion Collection
Essays
Sep 23, 2002 — René Clair’s early sound film is an iconic vision of lower-class Paris bursting with charm and romance.
Mar 18, 2025 — In what he described as his “first serious drama,” Charlie Chaplin channeled the influence of modernist literature, foreign cinema, and his European travels into a work of striking formal sophistication.
Jan 28, 1991 — The following review, one of the most renowned in the history of film criticism, appeared in The New Yorker magazine on October 28, 1972. It is reprinted with the permission of the author, Pauline Kael. Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in...
May 2, 2017 — It was a cold January morning, with biting winds coming off the Seine, when I stopped by the Librairie du Cinéma du Panthéon during a break from working on our upcoming release of Marcel Pagnol’s Marseille Trilogy. This film-specialty bookstore...
Jan 14, 2025 — In this digressive, intensely interior masterpiece, Jean Eustache mines the dramas of his past romances while also capturing the disillusionment of young Parisians in the aftermath of May 1968.
The Daily
Jan 8, 2020 — A major retrospective at the Cinémathèque française has us turning to writing by Peter Wollen, Gilberto Perez, and Jonathan Rosenbaum.
The Daily
Nov 14, 2019 — Curators Richard Peña and Livia Bloom Ingram bring nine “under the radar” titles by independent American filmmakers to the Cinémathèque française.
The Daily
Oct 31, 2018 — The nominations for the British Independent Film Awards and the Louis Delluc Prize are out.
The Daily
Mar 15, 2018 — In what Tim Adams, profiling Tacita Dean for the Guardian, calls “an unprecedented collaboration” between “three of the nation’s most prestigious institutions,” two exhibitions are opening in London today—Portrait at the National Portrait Gallery and Still Life at the National...
Short Takes
Dec 14, 2015 — In the early 1960s, Agnès Varda traveled to Cuba to make the documentary Salut les Cubains (1963). Varda’s twenty-eight-minute film, composed almost entirely of photographs that captured Cuba’s vibrant postrevolutionary culture, was inspired by two of Chris Marker’s films—Varda took...