The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Aug 10, 2012 — Never has a Hollywood filmmaker been less fazed by the prospect of tackling adaptations of major books than the journeyman director John Huston. By the time he dug his nails into Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 Under the Volcano (ranked the eleventh...
Short Takes
Aug 8, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors about what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made and compiled the results. The...
Jul 31, 2012 — Aki Kaurismäki’s latest working-class fable is his warmest, and his most political.
Jul 14, 2012 — Simply stated, Wes Anderson is the most original presence in American film comedy since Preston Sturges. He is as boundlessly confident as Sturges was in his heyday, and he has a similarly keen ear for gaudy dialogue; a gift for...
Jul 11, 2012 — Performances Of all the stultified suburban folks in The Ice Storm, Ang Lee’s diamond-sharp adaptation of Rick Moody’s novel about two Connecticut families in the early seventies, Sigourney Weaver’s Janey Carver might appear the least in need of attention. Most...
Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.
Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.
Sneak Peeks
Jun 22, 2012 — As is evident from his intensely personal theater and film work, Spalding Gray always laid himself bare to his audiences. But it’s unlikely you’ll ever get more up close and personal than with the following footage of the man’s eye...
Jun 21, 2012 — The following interview with actor Ruth Gordon originally appeared in the April 4, 1971, edition of the New York Times. “Have ya gotta angle for the story?” The accent—part New England hayseed, part Dead-End Kid—is unmistakable. It belongs to Ruth...
Short Takes
Jun 1, 2012 — Though his career was devastatingly brief, Jean Vigo was able to leave behind many unforgettable images that have joined the cinematic pantheon. One of them is undoubtedly Zéro de conduite’s boarding-school insurrectionists in pajamas, whooping it up in slow motion...