The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 16, 2014 — Georges Franju evokes the surreal silent serials of Louis Feuillade while constructing his own personal cinematic paradise.
Sep 23, 2013 — The neorealist master and the Hollywood icon forged a brilliant artistic path together, despite the backlash their controversial romance generated.
Apr 17, 2013 — Four of the great Japanese director’s lesser-known, early films show the coming into being of a political artist.
Apr 24, 2012 — An unverifiable, if heartfelt, assertion: For the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (or from Rome Open City to Fellini Satyricon), the world’s greatest popular cinema was produced in Italy—a realm of glamorous superstars, sensational comedians, and great genre flicks....
Dec 2, 2010 — Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1968) opens in a shiny space: nuns breeze past; a woman in a white uniform clacks through, bearing towels; a baby cries. People wait. The feeling is “hospital.” A second woman in white delivers towels, and we...
Essays
Jun 21, 2010 — A new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. —Michelangelo Antonioni Red Desert came out in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of the war,...
Oct 6, 2008 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career.
Jan 21, 2008 — Lindsay Anderson’s adaptation of David Storey’s novel is a clenched fist of a movie that follows a professional Rugby League player who instinctively channels feeling through physical aggression.
Essays
Jan 16, 2007 — The marvel of Mouchette inheres in the elegance, obstinacy, and capaciousness of Bresson’s double-mindedness.
Apr 24, 2006 — M ade in 1965 and still considered by many to be Marco Bellocchio’s masterpiece, Fists in the Pocket foreshadows the years of student protest in a family tragedy bordering on horror. This seminal first feature catapulted the twenty-six-year-old Bellocchio to...