Criterion Current
20 stories
Criterion CurrentUSAOnce Upon a Time: Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner I n 1955, more than a decade before the television series The Prisoner premiered on British airwaves for a solitary season, show creator and star Patrick McGoohan was in Milan shooting scenes for…
Criterion CurrentUSATotal Action: A Conversation with Darol Olu Kae I ndividuation has no place in the cinematic compositions of Darol Olu Kae; his work is far more interested in affinities and interconnections between people and their histories.
Criterion CurrentUSATerror on the Airwaves I n the 1960s, American television networks opened a new front in their cold war with Hollywood: instead of licensing existing films, they would make their own, offering viewers the chance to see new…
Criterion CurrentUSADeath Is a Highway S ome of horror’s most memorable monsters travel by road. As seen in the Highway Horror collection I have programmed for the Criterion Channel, automobiles can function as death traps, murder…
Criterion CurrentUSADeeper into Horror Deep Dives T he Criterion Channel includes a treasure trove of horror movies ranging from the widely celebrated to the rare and unknown.
Criterion CurrentUSAGuillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein O n New Year’s Day 1818, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was first published, in an anonymous three-volume edition of five hundred copies, costing a steep sixteen shillings and…
Criterion CurrentUSAGod Laughs: Stanley Kubrick’s Cinema S tanley Kubrick would not appear, at first glance, to have the stuff of a Kubrickian hero. He did not in any sense resemble the ringleader of a racetrack heist, a colonel or a soldier of fortune…
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Silence of the Lambs: Reckoning with Jame Gumb T he figure of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) is the single most culturally influential and dominant trans film image to date.
Criterion CurrentUSAChristiane F.: Up Against the Wall O ne of the great Berlin films, Uli Edel’s Christiane F. (1981) is also one of the grungiest. Based on the true story of teenage heroin user and sex worker Christiane Felscherinow and shot on…
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Criterion Channel’s November 2026 Lineup Channel Calendars T his November, discover the link between pop style and turn-of-the-century cinema’s exuberant visual innovation with From MTV to Hollywood, a collection gathering work from…
Criterion CurrentUSAThe Shout: Sound and Fury S ound, in the words of the protagonist of Robert Graves’s 1927 short story “The Shout,” is “a curious thing.” At once ephemeral and concrete, sound emerges from people and objects but is free to…
Criterion CurrentUSAWelcome II the Terrordome: The Future Is Furious T he first theatrically distributed British feature directed by a Black woman was perhaps always destined to be labeled as angry, no matter what it was about.
Criterion CurrentUSACinema as a Buddhist Practice: A Conversation with Khyentse Norbu F ilm director Khyentse Norbu is a rare and exotic bird by any definition. He’s more widely known as Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche (DJKR), a highly esteemed Tibetan Buddhist teacher with a large…
Criterion CurrentUSADays and Nights in the Forest: Into the Woods T here’s an unforgettable image in Louis Malle’s 1969 documentary Calcutta: From a remote high angle, we see a battle between police and protesters unfold on the streets of the eponymous city (now…
Criterion CurrentUSAThree Films by Leos Carax: Vital Signs W hen Leos Carax shot his first feature-length film, Boy Meets Girl (1984), he was only twenty-three years old.
Criterion CurrentUSAJacques Rivette Envisions a More Human Joan of Arc Deep Dives I t was hardly an auspicious beginning, when the sixteen-year-old girl calling herself Jeanne la Pucelle arrived at the French court in February of 1429.
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…
Nothing matches this filter yet.