The Criterion Collection

In town for the New York Film Festival screenings of his much-admired A Christmas Tale, French director Arnaud Desplechin talked to Dennis Lim about his always allusive filmmaking style and his particular influences in making this . . . Read more »

This week, the New York Times compiled its special annual holiday movie preview, and judging by Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek’s enthusiasm for a slew of upcoming DVD releases for November and December, it seems critics are looking . . . Read more »

Goetz Spielmann’s Revanche, a 2008 festival favorite and Austria’s submission for the best foreign film Oscar, has found a North American home with sister companies Janus Films and the Criterion Collection. In a rare step into the first-run . . . Read more »

Variety reported today that Mike Nichols is getting ready to direct a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s beloved 1963 thriller High and Low, from a new screenplay by David Mamet, and likely to be executive produced by Martin Scorsese, who originally . . . Read more »

“Greek director Costa-Gavras is like Oliver Stone with subtlety,” declares Chris Nashawaty in his Entertainment Weekly review of Missing. More than two decades have passed since Costa-Gavras’s political thriller won awards around the world . . . Read more »

The ongoing rediscovery of the multitude of masterworks that made up the career of Kenji Mizoguchi continues with the release of Eclipse Series 13: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women. The set, writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times, “rescues . . . Read more »

TECHNICOLOR, ROME—What a day! After spending the morning with Antonio Salvatori, the original color timer on Rosi’s The Moment of Truth and Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman, we were lucky enough to run into the great master Giuseppe . . . Read more »

The films of Constantin Costa-Gavras are often described as political thrillers, and the phrase is helpful as long as we pause over it a little. There is always a strongly personal element to his stories, a human factor, and the thrills are in . . . Read more »

Though he had been directing films since the silent era, collaborating with many different film studios in various genres, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting, as did his . . . Read more »

While in New York for the premiere of Ashes of Time Redux, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai and his long-time cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, sat down with Leonard Lopate for the radio host’s daily show. In the course of discussing the . . . Read more »

Michael Boland’s design for Criterion’s special edition release of Vampyr has gotten some special attention of its own, from the prestigious design journal Communications Arts. In the Exhibit section—highlighting “outstanding examples of . . . Read more »

Okay, quiz time. What does the music video for Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” have to do with the Criterion Collection? Give up? Well, it was shot by none other than ace director of photography Christopher Doyle, whose work is being brought . . . Read more »

Lola Montès, Max Ophuls’s final film and some would say greatest masterpiece, opened today in New York and Los Angeles in what is being touted as the definitive restoration. Butchered by its producers and a flop on initial release in 1955, the . . . Read more »

It seems Pier Paolo Pasolini’s infamous Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom hasn’t lost any of its horrifying power. “The 1970s was a hotbed of scandalous art cinema, but Salò—unlike such X-rated shockers as Last Tango in Paris or In the Realm of . . . Read more »

It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le doulos hews to . . . Read more »

Le deuxième souffle, Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career. It points back to the somewhat abstract, elemental, and iconographically . . . Read more »

9 August 2008: I go to the neighborhood theater to see Snow Trail (a.k.a. To the End of the Silver Mountains, a.k.a. Ginrei no haté), a 1946 Senkichi Taniguchi film now revived because it was Toshiro Mifune’s second film. Revived now because in . . . Read more »