Advanced search
- TITLES
- NAMES
- COLLABORATIONS
Search filters
Enter full date
to
or just enter yyyy, or yyyy-mm below
to
to
to
Exclude
Only includes titles with the selected topics
to
In minutes
to
1-23 of 23
- The eccentric members of a dysfunctional family reluctantly gather under the same roof for various reasons.
- A carpenter in the Fascist Slovak State is appointed "Aryan controller" of a Jewish widow's store.
- Les Blank's first feature-length documentary captures music and other events at Leon Russell's Oklahoma recording studio during a three-year period (1972-1974).
- Actor Frances McDormand auditioned for 'Blood Simple' on the recommendation of her friend Holly Hunter, and the part of Abby Marty became her first feature role. In this interview from June 2016, McDormand offers insight into the Coen brothers' creative process and discusses how the film changed her life, both personally and professionally.
- Based on actual characters and events, the screenplay by Leslie Lee, from a story by producer Elsa Rassbach, follows the journey of Frank Custer (Damien Leake), a young black sharecropper from Mississippi who, in the aftermath of World War I, travels to Chicago for a job on the "killing floor" of a meatpacking plant and the promise of greater racial equity in the industrial North. There, he must navigate the seething ethnic and class conflicts-stoked by management and culminating in the Chicago race riot of 1919-as he attempts to unite his fellow workers in a fight for fair treatment.
- Assembled by former bassist Phil King from Super 8 footage he shot during the group's time on the road, the film offers an appropriately ethereal behind-the-scenes record of Lush at their impossibly cool peak.
- Marlon Riggs and Peter Webster's thesis project reflects on the heyday of Oakland blues in the late 1940s and '50s, when an influx of African American shipyard workers mostly hailing from Louisiana and Texas arrived in the Bay Area. Combining vintage photographs, archival footage, interviews, and performances at venues like Eli's Mile High Club, Riggs and Webster chronicle Oakland's vibrant past while revealing an uncertain present.
- Interview outtakes from Jeffrey Schwarz's 2013 documentary 'I Am Divine' which feature director John Waters; actors Susan Lowe, Mink Stole, George Figgs, and Mary Vivian Pearce; film critic Dennis Dermody; production designer Vincent Peranio; and production manager Pat Moran.
- A documentary on Derek Jarman and 'Jubilee' made by Jarman actor Spencer Leigh.
- In 1959 Hiroshi Teshigahara shot the following 16 mm footage of he and his father's first trip to Barcelona and the outlying Catalonian countryside, including a visit to the home of Salvador Dali in Port Lligat. The footage was recorded without sound.
- Highlighting both the joys and trials of growing up Black in the Midwest, three young Milwaukee residents confront and reconcile the unrequited love between them and their city. Through outspoken interviews, they reveal the ways in which Milwaukee has shaped them and they in turn have shaped Milwaukee. Graced with poetry and luminous images, Marquise Mays's heartfelt documentary takes an at once loving and critical look at a city still riven by inequality-while offering an empowering vision for a brighter future.
- Therese Frare's photograph of the AIDS activist David Kirby on his deathbed incited international controversy when it was used in a United Colors of Benetton advertisement in 1992. This short documentary, commissioned by "Time" magazine for their series "100 Photos" about the most influential photographs of all time, features photographer Therese Frare, former Benetton creative director Oliviero Toscani, and the artists and AIDS activists Tom Kalin and Marlene McCarty.
- To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of The Battle of Algiers (1966), we revisited our edition of the film and our interviews with director Gillo Pontecorvo and producer Saadi Yacef, who discuss the process of depicting Algeria's fight for independence and the challenges of presenting a balanced vision of the conflict. This documentary is featured on the 3-Disc Criterion Collection DVD for La Bataille d'Alger (1966), released in 2004.
- "The music for 'A Woman Under the Influence' is basically about love," says Bo Harwood, the longtime collaborator of John Cassavetes's who composed that film's score. "It's about loving somebody, loving your family, loving them no matter what." This purity of emotion comes through in the stirring piano themes that recur throughout the movie, which were inspired by conversations Harwood had with Cassavetes about the emotionally turbulent story. When the director approached Harwood to work on the music, he described the female protagonist-a suburban housewife (Gena Rowlands) who suffers an emotional breakdown-over an impassioned hour-and-and-a-half-long phone conversation. And in the process, Harwood says, Cassavetes "became this woman." In this new video by Daniel Raim-a follow-up to an earlier piece featuring Harwood-the composer talks about this and other memories from the production of the film, and reflects on how he crafted a sound that conveys the power of love shared by the characters while also evoking their melancholy and loss.
- In her exquisitely subtle character studies, American filmmaker Kelly Reichardt is attuned to both the grandeur of sprawling landscapes and the rich complexities of human relationships. For this episode of Masterclass, we go to the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles for the tenth-anniversary celebration of cutting-edge indie distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories, where the writer-director sat down for a conversation with film critic April Wolfe. Watch the talk alongside Reichardt's celebrated films: River of Grass, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, and Meek's Cutoff.
- This documentary, detailing the working relationship between director Hiroshi Teshigahara and writer Kobo Abe, features interviews with critics and a number of the filmmaker's associates and friends, including film programmer and professor Richard Peña, Japanese-film scholars Donald Richie and Tadao Sato, set designer Arata Isozaki, screenwriter John Nathan, and producer Noriko Nomura. The interviews were recorded in 2006.
- One of the true pioneers of American independent cinema, John Cassavetes had a style and method all his own, instilling his tumultuous dramas of everyday modern life with an unflinching emotional honesty and a kinetic sense of spontaneity. Cassavetes, who came up as a theater actor himself and also appeared on-screen throughout his career, gained renown as a director for drawing galvanic and often improvised performances from a regular stable of actors that included Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, Peter Falk, and, most notably, his wife, Gena Rowlands. But his significant collaborators were by no means limited to the cast. In a new documentary premiering today in 10 Minutes or Less, a section of short videos on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, filmmaker Daniel Raim throws the spotlight on composer and sound recordist Bo Harwood, who forged a close working relationship with Cassavetes over the course of six films. Raim's intimate portrait-which appears alongside our full edition of five of the director's key films (Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Opening Night)-finds Harwood fondly recalling Cassavetes's compassion and creative generosity, the intuitive method of communication they developed, and his initial realization that the director, whom he took to be "a New York conservative businessman," was anything but.
- Under the leadership of editor and writer Stan Lee, Marvel Comics began its rise as a pop-culture juggernaut in the sixties. Among its legions of fans were some of the most distinguished figures in world cinema. In this new video by Daniel Raim, Lee lovingly remembers Alain Resnais, the experimental genius behind Hiroshima mon amour, who became a close friend and his collaborator on an ambitious science-fiction screenplay called The Monster Maker. The project was to be an exciting meeting of the minds, as the unconventional storytelling approach that Lee had fostered at Marvel paralleled Resnais's own audacious style. While the movie was ultimately never made, this video will make you wonder what might have become of Resnais's Hollywood ambitions, which also included his unfulfilled dream to direct a Spider-Man movie. Head to the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, where you'll find more short pieces like this in our weekly updated section 10 Minutes or Less.
- In the following program, produced by the Criterion Collection in 2018, director Michael Moore and 'Bowling for Columbine' chief archivist Carl Deal, composer and field producer Jeff Gibbs, supervising producer Tia Lessin, and field producer Meghan O'Hara discuss the process by which a film by Michael Moore gets made.
- In this interview, shot by the Criterion Collection in 2018, Ron Briley, author of 'The Ambivalent Legacy of Elia Kazan: The Politics of the Post-HUAC Films', discusses the origins of the Lonesome Rhodes character in the biographies of populist celebrities such as Will Rogers and Arthur Godfrey. He also addresses the political implications of 'A Face in the Crowd' (1957) within the context of Kazan's career.
- In this 2018 video essay, Bernard Herrmann scholar Christopher Husted explores the relationship between Orson Welles's 'mangled' film and Herrmann's 'mangled' score, and looks to the full version of the score Herrmann composed for clues about Welles's original vision for 'The Magnificent Ambersons' (1942).
- 'A Face in the Crowd' was Andy Griffith's first film role; he would go on to be most famous for his folksy portrayal of Sheriff Andy Taylor on television's The Andy Griffith Show. In this interview, filmed by the Criterion Collection in 2018, Griffith expert Evan Dalton Smith discusses the actor's difficulties with the role of Lonesome Rhodes and how it led to his career-defining television show.
- This conversation between series curator Michael Koresky and author Mark Harris was recorded in 2023.