The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 14, 2012 — Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.
Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...
Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.
Aug 30, 2012 — In the 1960s, Mailer, already a literary legend, was inspired by the avant-garde film movement to take a stab at his own, anti-Warholian underground cinema.
Aug 21, 2012 — Andrew Haigh’s boy-meets-boy story reminds us that the biggest pleasures of falling in love come from the little moments of connection.
Jun 11, 2012 — Charlie Chaplin’s transcendent, visionary comedy is made up of one iconic moment after another.
Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...
Jan 24, 2012 — From the scary thuds and mysterious roars that accompany the no-frills titles to the bizarrely poignant final image of the monster, alone at the bottom of the ocean, Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla is all business and pure dream.
Short Takes
Jul 20, 2011 — Wes Anderson’s vision of New York City in The Royal Tenenbaums may be a storybook one, but, as a new short video on the A.V. Club proves, it’s all based on reality. The entertaining three-and-a-half-minute piece—made as part of the...