The Criterion Collection

In her latest column, critic Imogen Sara Smith explains how cinematographer Henri Decaë brought a risk-taking spirit and seductive allure to some of the most iconic French crime films. Read more »

Matteo Garrone’s gritty portrait of the Neapolitan Mafia draws on a lineage of Italian crime films dating back to Francesco Rosi’s trailblazing Salvatore Giuliano. Read more »

French New Wave icon Jeanne Moreau possessed a stillness, a way of surrendering to the camera, that made her utterly unique among modern actors. Read more »

What is the defining characteristic of the femme fatale? Critic Imogen Sara Smith explores the range of this film noir archetype through a handful of classic performances. Read more »

A veteran of Japan’s legendary Shochiku studios, the versatile genre auteur Yoshitaro Nomura made his mark with a string of impeccably constructed thrillers. Five of his best are now available to stream on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck. Read more »

Director Terry Zwigoff shares his own musical taste in this article about how he went about selecting songs to underscore the deadpan tone of his cult comedy Ghost World. Read more »

On a trip to the Library of Congress’s Mostly Lost workshop—affectionately known as “film-geek heaven”—Imogen Sara Smith joined early-cinema aficionados in uncovering treasures from the vaults. Read more »

British director Jack Clayton elicited landmark performances from a host of great ladies of the cinema, including Maggie Smith, Deborah Kerr, and Anne Bancroft. Read more »

Filmmaker Brock DeShane pays heartfelt tribute to Jack H. Harris, the late cult-horror maestro who produced low-budget sensations like The Blob and Equinox. Read more »

What defines noir acting? In her latest Dark Passages column, Imogen Sara Smith examines the stylistic variety in some of the genre’s most iconic male performances, including Burt Lancaster in The Killers and Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly. Read more »

Andrzej Wajda on the set of Danton Two and a half weeks before his unexpected passing on October 9, 2016, at the age of ninety, Andrzej Wajda made his last public appearance at the Gdynia Film Festival, Poland’s largest annual film event. On . . . Read more »

In the inaugural installment of his new column, archivist Michael Chaiken examines the Nobel Prize–winning icon’s unique artistic process through a collection of ephemera. Read more »

The Asphalt Jungle To make the performance of a tedious, exacting, time-consuming task riveting to watch, it is only necessary for the activity to be illegal. This is the lesson of heist movies, in which rigorous attention to process and . . . Read more »

Imogen Sara Smith examines the tensions between tradition and modernity reflected in two silent crime films by Yasujiro Ozu and Tomu Uchida. Read more »

Westerns cover a lot of territory. Dramatizing the most romantic of American myths, they also give form to the darkest inversions of those myths. The genre that celebrated rugged pioneer values and civilization’s conquest of the wilderness . . . Read more »

Rock critic Robert Christgau examines the evocative use of three early Leonard Cohen songs in Robert Altman’s brilliant revisionist western. Read more »

If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop. Read more »

Chinchón is not Paris. It’s not Ibiza. It’s not even Grenoble. It’s a sleepy, provincial Spanish town an hour’s bus ride out of Madrid, and not where you would expect to find the great Orson Welles at the mid-1960s height of his European . . . Read more »

If you want to start an argument among noir fans, there’s no easier way than proposing to add or subtract a film from the canon. All these debates turn on the eternally tricky question: what is film noir? Fittingly for a body of films so full . . . Read more »

In this essay, first published in Grand Street in 1994, Dr. Strangelove coscreenwriter Terry Southern offers a lively behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production. Read more »

We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.
Read more »

Consider the story of Lolabelle, the rat terrier cast by Laurie Anderson—her human companion—in Anderson’s stirring, tender film Heart of a Dog. In extraordinary footage, Anderson reveals her four-legged friend’s remarkable ability to both . . . Read more »

By the time Charlie Chaplin began work on what would be his first feature-length film, in 1919, he had been sneaking up to the longer format for some time. Read more »

Last week, we were saddened to learn of the passing, at the age of eighty-four, of the beloved Italian writer and director Ettore Scola. The filmmaker was a luminary of Italian cinema for more than half a century, and his body of work has left . . . Read more »

It was in May of 2012, at the memorial service for Grove Press founder Barney Rosset, that I first saw Haskell Wexler in person. Read more »

Earlier this week, the New York Film Critics Circle held its annual awards dinner in Manhattan. This year, our late, beloved cofounder William Becker was honored with a special posthumous award commemorating him and Janus Films. Read more »

The late Haskell Wexler wore many hats—he was an independent, impassioned documentarian; a commercial Hollywood cinematographer; a political and social activist; an institutional (even union) contrarian. He was also an exemplar of how to live. Read more »

Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien is back with an awe-inspiring martial-arts epic. Read more »

Movie comedies about moviemaking through the decades Read more »

It Happened One Night is part of a long tradition of American comedies on the move. Read more »