The Criterion Collection
"Life caught unawares," that's how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov defined the principle and art of documentary in the thirties. Yet the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it is too simple to call it the...
Mar 26, 2025 — Ten newly restored features screen for a week in New York starting Friday.
Sep 30, 2017 — Before We Vanish, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard program at Cannes, screens tonight (Saturday) and tomorrow (October 1) as part of the Main Slate of this year’s New York Film Festival.“This giddily enjoyable stew of absurdist gore from...
Essays
Oct 16, 2006 — Lodge Kerrigan’s grim, lucid dispatch from the murky depths of madness situates itself inside the tormented consciousness of a schizophrenic.
The Daily
Jul 16, 2017 — “Legendary filmmaker George A. Romero, father of the modern movie zombie and creator of the groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead franchise, has died at 77,” reports Tre’vell Anderson for the Los Angeles Times. “Romero died Sunday in his sleep...
Nov 6, 2006 — The New York Times ran a really nice piece about the Janus box this morning. It started on the front page of the Arts section and jumped to another half page inside. It featured big pictures from M, L'Avventura, Seven...
Sep 29, 2017 — One of the most elusive artists in American cinema opens a window onto his private life and creative methods in this revelatory documentary.
Interviews
Jun 30, 2025 — An up-and-coming director reflects on the resourcefulness and scrappy ingenuity that went into making his three films, now playing on the Criterion Channel.
Oct 20, 2015 — Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien is back with an awe-inspiring martial-arts epic.
Oct 19, 2023 — Her entrance in the film is impossible to forget. She swings into the scene to serve a patron some coffee, holding a cup in one hand and a book in the other. Her diamond-shaped face is obscured, but her aura...