The Criterion Collection
Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....
Essays
May 21, 2007 — In January 1948, British film producer Sir Alexander Korda, head of British-Lion and London Film Productions, commissioned novelist Graham Greene to write and research “an original postwar continental story to be based on either or both of the following territories:...
Essays
Feb 12, 2007 — The trailblazing career of the extraordinary singer, actor, and activist was pivotal to the emergence of a black film aesthetic and, by extension, an African-American cultural identity.
Jun 19, 2006 — Decades after its backyard birth, Jack Woods’s DIY horror movie has forged a model of inspiration for succeeding generations of effects artists and low-budget filmmakers.
Dec 30, 2003 — Akira Kurosawa was a man of his time, who participated fully in the artistic and intellectual world of Japan from the 1930s until his death in 1998. Although filmgoers may think of him in terms of the screen images he...
Essays
Sep 17, 2001 — Jirí Menzel’s war comedy is an absurdist symphony of self-absorption and impotence.
Jun 26, 2000 — Kevin Smith writes about his third feature as a sort of penance/valentine for the woman who made him grow up.
Features
Mar 3, 2020 — American cinema is over 125 years old, and African Americans have been a part of it from the beginning. This participation has often been fraught, stymied, and curtailed, but the desire to use motion pictures to craft a self-image has...
On the Channel
Mar 14, 2018 — Bette Davis struck a blow against expectations of pliant female loveliness and grace with her role as a no-nonsense teacher in The Corn Is Green.