Spotlight
Under the Influence
In this ongoing series of videos, contemporary filmmakers talk to us about the movies that have had a lasting impact on their work.
Current
An online magazine covering film culture past and present
Night Moves: Losing Ground
Set in a grimy, unglamorous version of Los Angeles, Arthur Penn’s Watergate-era neonoir tells the story of an honorable private eye acutely conscious of living in an era that is the mere shadow of a nobler past.
Choose Me: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Unfettered by the precepts of bourgeois morality and the nuclear family, the characters in Alan Rudolph’s romantic drama struggle to find happiness as they navigate love’s whims and ambiguities.
Pixel Visions: Dogme 95 and the Emergence of Digital Cinema
At the turn of the millennium, a loose collective of filmmakers—including Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg—made a splash with a provocative manifesto and a wave of audacious movies shot on digital video.
Anthony Banua-Simon’s Top 10
The director of Cane Fire focuses on films that have influenced his own work, including innovative nonfiction masterpieces by Agnès Varda, William Greaves, and Barbara Kopple.
The Criterion Channel’s April 2025 Lineup
This month, celebrate the career of one of our greatest contemporary actors, explore a gritty period in New York City’s history, and look back on the legacy of the Vietnam War.
Godzilla vs. Biollante: The Real Monsters
This stellar entry in one of cinema’s greatest monster franchises combines science fiction’s age-old exploration of human arrogance with the full force of cinematic imagination.
A Woman of Paris: “Whatever Became of Marie St. Clair?”
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.
How to Steal a Scene
While a film’s stars are forced to bear the responsibility of moving a narrative forward, supporting actors get to have fun providing comic relief or suggesting whole lives being lived beyond the screen.
Performance: Cavorting with the Void
Misunderstood on release and mishandled by its distributor, this genuine cult classic opened the door to a radical new way of making films.
Between the Lines of Joan Micklin Silver
Like many of the characters found throughout the director’s oeuvre, the alternative-press staffers at the center of her sophomore feature are bound up in a perpetual tug-of-war between past and present realities.
Drugstore Cowboy: Higher Powers
Gus Van Sant’s lyrical exploration of addiction and faith—adapted from an autobiographical novel by James Fogle—influenced cinematic drug depictions throughout the nineties and helped to initiate a wave of American independent filmmaking.
Next Stop: The Criterion Mobile Closet at SXSW
Following its wildly successful launch at the New York Film Festival and a Brooklyn stop at St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Criterion Mobile Closet is making its first trip outside of New York City this March.
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