The Criterion Collection

Of all the great places I get to go for transfer work, London is probably my favorite. First off, everyone speaks English, and there’s an abundance of great Indian food. But there’s also the excitement that when the workday ends, you end up at . . . Read more »

Midway through David Storey’s novel This Sporting Life, published in 1960, the widow Mrs. Hammond tells the hero that her relationship with him is making her feel “dirty.” “I couldn’t think why she should say all this,” he muses, “and the . . . Read more »

For some writers, persona threatens to overshadow achievement. Such is the case with August Strindberg (1849–1912), best known outside of his native Sweden for his alleged misogyny and tumultuous family life. Married thrice and divorced from . . . Read more »

When it comes to world cinema, Jonathan Rosenbaum has tartly observed, many American critics are strict isolationists. At least for national film industries judged too exotic or marginal, a rule of “one director per country” seems to apply. By . . . Read more »

Funny how certain films come back to haunt you. I was a student in late 1980s London when I first saw Sans toit ni loi, and I remember liking everything about it. The terse English title Vagabond. The poster image of Sandrine Bonnaire with . . . Read more »

Few films have inspired as many wildly differing interpretations in the decades since their release as Agnès Varda’s 1964 Le bonheur (Happiness). Is it a pastoral? A social satire? A slap-down of de Gaulle–style family values? A lyrical . . . Read more »

There have been many films, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) to Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), devoted to the challenge of capturing or reconstituting the experience of “real time.” Agnès Varda’s 1961 Cléo from 5 to 7—an account of . . . Read more »

In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’ . . . Read more »

From upstairs at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris, you have a perfect view of the Café de Flore, directly across the boulevard Saint-Germain. Both are famous Left Bank institutions where filmmakers such as Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Claude . . . Read more »

NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH: RECOVERY EFFORT As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker. And this was hardly a coincidence: though he had made a name for himself as a promising popular craftsman . . . Read more »