The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 17, 2012 — “I felt they showed more of me than they’d said they were going to,” Catherine Deneuve remarked to Pascal Bonitzer in 2004, about the making of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 Belle de jour. “There were moments when I felt totally used....
Oct 24, 2011 — “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” says the narrator of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. “It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of...
Features
Oct 6, 2011 — When I was living in Haight-Ashbury in the second half of the 1970s, you’d still see Robert Crumb drawing in some coffeehouse now and again. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with him, as I probably wouldn’t have wanted...
Aug 9, 2011 — Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary epic commemorates the popular uprising that had succeeded in ousting the French from Algeria in July 1962.
Essays
Jun 14, 2011 — The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets The year is 1954: a fabulous bit of film history is about to unfurl. Grips are...
Apr 25, 2011 — In 1981, the legendary critic went all out for Blow Out, which she thought was De Palma's most mature work to date.
Essays
Mar 29, 2011 — As the only film of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera brought to the screen with the participation of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, Victor Schertzinger’s 1939 Technicolor The Mikado is a unique specimen; however one rates it, there is nothing with...
Essays
Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...
Features
Jun 17, 2010 — How do you make a comedy about something as serious as the Nazi threat of world domination—particularly as it is happening? Perhaps there’s something in the English character that allows them to see humor in disaster. Some sort of survival...
Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.