The Criterion Collection
Sep 16, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman plumbs the depths of a fractured family and gives Ingrid Bergman a shocking star role.
Jun 26, 2013 — On the life and work of the famous Czech author, and the pleasures and challenges of translating him.
Jun 17, 2013 — The silent legend practices slapstick with clockwork precision in his most iconic, astonishing comedy.
Mar 29, 2013 — When the world’s favorite comedian asked his audience to see him as a sociopathic serial killer, he was venturing where cinema had barely dared to tread.
Essays
May 25, 2012 — The following article by the filmmaker himself originally appeared in the German newspaper Die Filmwoche on May 20, 1931.
Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...
Oct 12, 2010 — One Every movie is two stories: the one it tells and the one that remains to be told about it by those involved in its creation. These two narratives converge in a certain current of the cinema of the past...
Short Takes
Aug 2, 2010 — The great, beloved screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico died this past weekend at the age of ninety-six. A longtime collaborator of Luchino Visconti’s (they’re pictured together above), including on the epic The Leopard (1963), Cecchi D’Amico worked with just about every...
Essays
Oct 25, 2009 — Costa-Gavras’s 1969 political assassination thriller Z appeared at the end of a decade of burgeoning cultural change and rampant paranoia. In the United States, this Algerian-French coproduction sparked a sensation, not just relaying the European political crisis but perfectly capturing...
May 20, 2009 — Iconoclasts are meant to kill their idols, and so it’s fitting that Shohei Imamura launched into his career as if on a patricidal rampage. Like Nagisa Oshima, the other towering figure of the Japanese New Wave, Imamura (1926–2006) rejected the...