The Seventh Seal

Max von Sydow has spent the past six decades cultivating one of cinema’s most illustrious careers, and now, at eighty-seven, the Swedish actor “may be on the verge of becoming a pop-culture icon,” writes Terrence Rafferty in the Atlantic.

Sweden's new two-hundred-krona bill features the country's most renowned filmmaker.

Christopher Hobbs is a production designer.

A genuine American movie legend, the eighty-seven-year-old producer and director Roger Corman has been in the film business since the early 1950s.

The Los Angeles–based music producer Flying Lotus (born Steve Ellison) has been working in the electronic music field since the early 2000s.

This week, Time is all too happy to judge a movie by its cover. Gilbert Cruz, an editor at the magazine, has compiled a list called “Top 10 Cool Criterion Collection Covers.” Cruz’s taste in design tends toward illustration over photography, th…

In compiling his top ten Criterions, Cronos director Guillermo del Toro had a hell of a time limiting himself. Del Toro humorously bemoaned the “unfair, arbitrary, and sadistic top ten practice,” so instead he decided on ties or rather, “themat

Caitlin Kuhwald designed the covers for Criterion’s editions of Heaven Can Wait, The Thief of Bagdad, and Amarcord. She lives in Oakland, teaches illustration at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and is a full-time freelance illu

In Stockholm, an auction of personal belongings from the estate of the great director Ingmar Bergman has just ended. The items ranged from parts of his daily life—his writing desk and wastepaper basket—to the chess set used in The Seventh Seal. B…

“In trying to come up with a ten best list from the Criterion Collection I thought first of Trouble in Paradise and decided to go online to find the rest. But after only seven pages of Criterion’s online list I already had more than enough for te

Like Gary Giddins in his recent Criterion essay, Andrew O’Hehir, in an engaging and sharp new DVD review for Salon, sets out to refute the long-held misconception that Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is a humorless, medicinal monolith. Pointing…

The first time I “met” Max was in May of 1959, when Bergman’s stunning production of Urfaust came to London for just one week in the World Theatre Season. Groupie of all things Swedish that I was, I waited outside the stage door at the end of t…

David Hudson lives in Berlin and translated screenplays until his blog, GreenCine Daily, swallowed him whole.

Peter Cowie has provided commentaries for around a dozen Criterion titles. His latest book, Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever, is available from Rizzoli.