The Criterion Collection

After the mugginess of the New York City summer, and with the launch of the new Criterion web store and the New York Film Festival keeping us all plenty busy through the end of September, Western Australia was a breath of fresh air for me—literally. . . . Read more »

When I started preparing for a new transfer of The Ice Storm, I asked director Ang Lee if he wanted to supervise the session. Ang said that he’d like the cinematographer, Fred Elmes, to supervise, and that he would come in at the end and review . . . Read more »

Under the Volcano, made in 1984, is the thirty-fourth of thirty-six feature films in a body of work that began in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon. Already ill but brimming with vitality, John Huston was then seventy-eight years old. He had always . . . Read more »

Like many American directors who emerged in the early 1970s, Terrence Malick went to film school—to the American Film Institute, where, indeed, his fellow students included Paul Schrader and David Lynch. But unlike many film school graduates, . . . Read more »

The opening of Breathless is “unprecedented,” in that we never learn what route brought Michel Poiccard to the Vieux Port of Marseille, where he surveys the future from the very edge of France. This first shot strikes a match to touch off . . . Read more »

I didn’t create the Criterion office’s word-of-the-day bulletin board, but I’m the latest logophile to carry the torch, er, dry-erase marker and update the white board in the kitchen. Occasionally someone will ask me what a certain word means . . . Read more »

One of Spain’s most acclaimed and prolific directors, Carlos Saura emerged as an artist in the late 1950s under Franco’s dictatorship and immediately made his mark as an incisive, if necessarily allusive, social and political commentator. In . . . Read more »

From an interview with Ang Lee in the Northwest Asia Weekly:NWAW: Two years ago, you recorded an introduction for the Criterion Collection DVD of Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, a film that had a tremendous impact on you as a student in Taiwan. . . . Read more »

“They all say that I’m ‘openly gay.’ But they put that in as a little political footnote . . . They don’t say anything about gayness. They just say, ‘He’s openly gay.’ They relate it a little bit to something, but they just get . . . Read more »