The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Oct 10, 2012 — Among Kurosawa’s films set in the twentieth century, Ikiru—which you can watch for free on Hulu this week—is probably the most widely seen and beloved. This soul-searching morality tale concerns Watanabe (the haunting Takashi Shimura), a widower and city worker...
Short Takes
Oct 5, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...
Essays
Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.
Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...
Sep 19, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s tale of love and devilry in medieval France was a sensation during the German occupation.
Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...
Essays
Aug 31, 2012 — He was a doctor, explorer, and anthropologist in addition to being a director. Learn more about the fascinating man who made Lonesome.
Interviews
Aug 28, 2012 — The boy Quadrophenia’s Jimmy was based on (or was he?) talks to us about the mod life.
Aug 21, 2012 — Andrew Haigh’s boy-meets-boy story reminds us that the biggest pleasures of falling in love come from the little moments of connection.
Essays
Aug 14, 2012 — The camera never stops moving in the Dardenne brothers’ portrait of a troubled teenage girl desperate for a job.