The Criterion Collection

A compelling reason to check out the splendid comedies in our new Eclipse Series 22: Presenting Sacha Guitry, from DVD Town’s Christopher Long: “The appeal of Sacha Guitry´s cinema in one word: wit,” he writes in a review of the set. “Whether he was born with it or cultivated it, Guitry was blessed with wit in spades.” Long goes on to laud the way the director, who started in theater, took to the fledgling film medium: “Guitry not only embraced the visual possibilities of cinema, he practically squeezed the stuffing right out of them.

More from the Los Angeles Times’ Dennis Lim, who praises these “dazzling comedies,” and the New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who calls the films in the set “effervescent, extroverted,” adding “Partisans of the long take may marvel at those that Guitry uses to preserve the performances: he routinely lets the camera run for two or three minutes at a stretch in the service of the actors’ theatrical virtuosity and, above all, his own.” Also, Nicolas Rapold peeks at this "quartet of playful 1930s works" for Artforum.

2AUG2010: Dave Kehr in the New York Times: “His work represents some of the most purely pleasurable filmmaking imaginable, an inexhaustible storehouse of wit, joy, sensuality and wisdom.”