The Four

Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.

Dec 13, 2011 — Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.

Apr 28, 2011 — When Criterion producer Susan Arosteguy was at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, last month, she met local cooking teacher and cinephile Ron Deutsch in line for a screening. They got to chatting, and Ron told Susan...

Feb 8, 2011 — Federico Fellini was born and brought up in Rimini, Italy, a small seaside town in the province of Emilia-Romagna. Amarcord is a neologism he contrived, which comes closest to the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect phrase mi ricordo (I remember). Fellini, a great...

Aug 17, 2010 — In his defiantly maverick directing career, which yielded only ten features in thirty-five years, Maurice Pialat (1925–2003) was a stimulant and irritant, agitating the cozy pool of French cinema. His first effort, the lyrically bitter short essay film L’amour existe...

Feb 16, 2010 — It may be news to many, but in addition to creating such larger-than-life characters as The Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter and Howards End’s Henry Wilcox (not to mention, once upon a time, the titular protagonist in James Ivory’s...

May 13, 2009 — It doesn’t really come as a surprise that Chris Marker is a devoted inhabitant of the virtual world Second Life. After all, one could call the playful French filmmaker and multimedia artist’s kitty—and alter ego—Guillaume-en-Egypt a trailblazing avatar (when asked...

Feb 14, 2005 — A touchstone of Jean-Luc Godard‘s political period, the film plays with the idea of recording working-class history as it is happening.

May 26, 2003 — Embracing the world while pretending to sneer at it, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s crime film is rich, deep, and wily.

Nov 19, 2001 — Luis Buñuel’s drama is a seductive work that exemplifies, even as it studies, the perversity of human desire.