The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Dec 31, 2015 — Back in October, the great Liv Ullmann stopped by Criterion to film a program for the release of Jan Troell’s 1970s films The Emigrants and The New Land, which form a two-part epic in which Ullmann stars alongside Max von...
Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.
Essays
Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...
Essays
Mar 27, 2012 — Coward and Lean? It may not sound as natural as Launder and Gilliat or Powell and Pressburger, perhaps because we don’t instinctively think of Noël Coward as a filmmaker or of David Lean as part of a team. But they...
Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...
Essays
May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...
Oct 21, 2008 — TECHNICOLOR, ROME—What a day! After spending the morning with Antonio Salvatori, the original color timer on Rosi’s The Moment of Truth and Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman, we were lucky enough to run into the great master Giuseppe Rotunno, who...
Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...
Essays
Feb 19, 2001 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s romance film spins a web of myth and evocative symbolism around its central search for self-discovery.
Jun 14, 2013 — Did You See This?• Die poster-geist • Notes on camp • Lost writing from James Agee comes to light. • Michael Atkinson’s golden silents • Cronenberg is coming! • Tokyo stories • Fatalistic faves • The Wire man on the...