Jul 20, 2022 — A brutal critique of the American dream, Carl Franklin’s 1995 thriller explicitly confronts the racialized implications of classic film noir.

Feb 25, 2025 — Misunderstood on release and mishandled by its distributor, this genuine cult classic opened the door to a radical new way of making films.

Jun 24, 2018 — During a period when studios gave him carte blanche, Josef von Sternberg created a sublime cinematic language that shrugged off one orthodoxy after another.

Jul 18, 2016 — Criterion’s resident researcher and web producer takes a trip to Madrid bookstore Ocho y Medio, which she calls “a shrine to Spanish contributions to the seventh art.”

Jan 21, 2016 — In Gilda, Charles Vidor’s “violent, sexual, chaotic” noir, the director focused on Rita Hayworth’s skills as an actor and a dancer, eliciting a performance that became iconic in its own right and made her an international superstar.

Aug 18, 2014 — The director explains the inspiration for his provocative erotic comedy, and how he dove into it even before finishing his previous movie.

Mar 5, 2021 — When the photographer Mary Ellen Mark died in 2015 at age seventy-five from myelodysplastic syndrome, she left behind a vast and varied five-decade trail of portraits and documentary pictures, collected in twenty books and dozens of exhibitions, radical in their...

Apr 8, 2019 — We just launched the new Criterion Channel today, and we’re hitting the ground running with a lineup of outstanding film noirs produced by Columbia Pictures between the midforties and the early sixties, after the company had risen from its humble...

Jan 31, 2023 — In this shape-shifting exploration of creativity, couplehood, and artistic influence, Mia Hansen-Løve offers a glimpse at the existential heavy lift required by her deceptively simple autofictions.

Sep 2, 2020 — Art speaks volumes in Céline Sciamma’s rapturous eighteenth-century love story Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and much of that is thanks to painter Hélène Delmaire. It is Delmaire’s vividly lifelike canvases that grace the film from start to finish,...