The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 6, 2014 — This humorous magazine piece from 1970 sheds some light on the meaning of the title of Il sorpasso, along with the way Vittorio Gassman comports himself behind the wheel in it.
Essays
Apr 29, 2014 — One legendary American director pays tribute to another.
Sneak Peeks
Apr 24, 2014 — Film scholar extraordinaire David Bordwell is among our most meticulous writers on the art of cinema, looking closely at the construction of a film to see what makes it work and how its technical approach reflects its historical moment. We...
Sneak Peeks
Apr 23, 2014 — Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso, coming out next week in a Criterion edition, was an inspiration for Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning Sideways. Being such a fan of the film, which is beloved in Italy but underappreciated here in the U.S., Payne agreed...
Apr 22, 2014 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare and modern visual style perfectly complements this comic and soulful domestic comeuppance story.
Mar 18, 2014 — In addition to technical brilliance and a humanist message, Akira Kurosawa’s adventure features one of the director’s strongest female characters.
Sneak Peeks
Mar 6, 2014 — Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film Breathless not only launched the French New Wave and made the director’s name forever synonymous with French art cinema—it also made a star out of its leading man, the theretofore unknown Jean-Paul Belmondo. The following excerpt...
Production Notes
Mar 5, 2014 — A few years ago, as I was collaborating on the Criterion release of Last Year at Marienbad, I had the chance to meet Alain Resnais. We had released Hiroshima mon amour and Night and Fog a few years earlier, and...
Features
Mar 2, 2014 — The author shares his memories of the French filmmaker, who died on Saturday.
Essays
Feb 28, 2014 — Other first films exude the sparkling joy of filmmaking that one feels in Breathless, but how many can boast its sure-handedness?