The Criterion Collection
Sep 23, 2011 — Performances Lillian Gish once said, “I’ve never been in style, so I can never go out of style.” The silent-screen legend was being modest, but she was clearly on to something—something that Charles Laughton grasped when he cast her as...
Essays
Sep 13, 2011 — Robert Altman’s spellbinding drama about stolen identities is propelled by evanescent reveries of his own and inventive contributions from cast and crew.
Sep 13, 2011 — Hollywood has been importing talented European filmmakers at least since the early twenties, when Victor Sjöström and Ernst Lubitsch heeded the siren wail of Tinseltown resources, and their work there has tended to quickly obscure the cultural memory of the...
Sep 7, 2011 — The Dryden Theatre—the exhibition space of the renowned George Eastman House film archive in Rochester, New York—is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary this year. And its recently hired programmer: Lori Donnelly, is thrilled to be there for the occasion. “It’s a...
Aug 31, 2011 — French sociologist Roger Caillois proposed that every form of human recreation could be placed somewhere on a continuum between two terms: ludus and paidia. The first of these represents games defined almost wholly by their rule systems. Crossword puzzles and...
Essays
Aug 30, 2011 — A startling blend of fantasy and reality, Lindsay Anderson’s satirical tale of adolescent rebellion personifies the 1960s.
Aug 15, 2011 — Celebrated as Stanley Kubrick’s first mature film and made when he was only twenty-eight years old, The Killing (1956) is remarkable for boldly announcing so many of the stylistic and thematic preoccupations that would become important constants of his cinema....
Akira Kurosawa once said, “The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression. Toshiro Mifune needed only three feet.” The filmmaker certainly gave Mifune a lot of space, however: over the course of sixteen...
Features
Jun 24, 2011 — Venues for repertory film programming in the United States generally fall into one of three categories: revival houses, museums, and university cinematheques. It seems like you hear the least about the latter, but college campus theaters are undoubtedly helping to...
Jun 20, 2011 — Genres collide in the great Hollywood movies of the midfifties cold-war thaw. With the truce in Korea and the red scare on the wane, ambitious directors seemed freer to mix and match and even ponder the new situation. The western...