Criterion Current
19 stories
Criterion CurrentUSAAnthologized: The World of W. Somerset Maugham On-Screen S ince the silent era, filmmakers and audiences have been drawn to a form that has been variously known as the omnibus film, the anthology film, the sketch film, and—my preferred term, for its image…
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Secret Agent: Left Out of History “I told you the story in the wrong order,” the protagonist of The Secret Agent (2025) admits, midway through a film that declines to linger for long on a single plot or timeline.
Criterion CurrentUSANouvelle Vague: Insolent Like No One Else A weight of seriousness has always hung around the critics of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma who went on to become the directors of the New Wave.
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Inner Worlds of Neon Genesis Evangelion “W hen did it start? Since when did animation stop being interesting? That is, animation itself may have stopped being interesting, and I myself may have been unable to maintain interest in…
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Criterion Channel’s October 2026 Lineup Channel Calendars T his October, hitch a ride to the heart of terror: our Halloween programming includes a full-throttle tour of cinema’s scariest road movies, an anthology of TV-movie nightmares…
Criterion CurrentUSACriterion Establishes a Canadian Home at Cinema Cellar T oday marks the opening of Criterion’s new Canadian home at Cinema Cellar, the independent home-video retailer’s first brick-and-mortar store, which will bring together Criterion and other leading…
Criterion CurrentUSAJames Baldwin Looks Back You used to say, “June? Honey when you come down here you supposed to stay with me. Where else?” Meanin home —June Jordan, “1977: Poem for Mrs.
Criterion CurrentUSAAmerican Dream: The Time Is Right “A merican Dream was the hardest film I ever made,” Barbara Kopple recently told me. That’s saying a lot for the pioneering documentarian’s multidecade career, in which she’s taken on such subjects…
Criterion CurrentUSAFive Radical Documentaries by Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi: Restlessness Refusing Resolution At the request of the author, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. “I make bitter films.
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Criterion Channel’s September 2026 Lineup Channel Calendars T his month on the Criterion Channel, we’re celebrating a truly independent artist with a career-spanning retrospective dedicated to the always-provocative, fiercely creative Abel…
Criterion CurrentUSASmall Town, Big Money: Capitalism Runs Amok in Turumba Deep Dives I n 1972, on the occasion of the Summer Games in Munich, the first-ever Olympic mascot made its debut.
Criterion CurrentUSACoup de torchon: “All Crimes Are Collective” T he leading light in the generation of French filmmakers who launched their careers in the 1970s in the wake of the nouvelle vague, Bertrand Tavernier was born in Lyon in 1941.
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Sudanese Film Group’s Legacy of Political Resistance and Creative Liberation S udan is full of film lovers. In the past, the country was famous for its open-air cinemas, where celluloid images played after sundown amid the hot desert climate.
Criterion CurrentUSA“A Radical Democracy of Images”: Mike Mills on His Work Outside of Feature Filmmaking The following interview was conducted in December 2025, as Criterion Collection executive producer Kim Hendrickson and director Mike Mills were working to prepare the box set I’ll Remind You of…
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Films of Mike Mills: A Human Space I cried the first time I saw a Mike Mills film. It happened at a screening of his first film, Thumbsucker, at the Oslo Film Festival. It must have been 2006, and Mike was there introducing it.
Criterion CurrentUSAGet Me Out of Here: Harry Dean Stanton in Straight Time H arry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed.
Criterion CurrentUSACruel Story of Youth: A Blank Generation A t the beginning of Cruel Story of Youth (1960), the title splashes across the screen in fiery red. Each of the three Japanese words that appear offers a key to understanding director Nagisa…
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Criterion Channel’s August 2026 Lineup Channel Calendars T his month on the Criterion Channel, crank up the volume on our playlist of (actually good) rock biopics that go beyond cliché to explore the elusive place where inspiration sparks…
Criterion CurrentUSAHud: No Place for Heroes I n May of 1962, when Martin Ritt arrived in the Texas Panhandle town of Claude to begin filming Hud, he may have sensed that his career was about to change.
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