The Criterion Collection
The Daily
Oct 5, 2017 — “When you make a movie called Spielberg,” begins Mike Hale in the New York Times, “and its subject agrees to sit for what turns out to be thirty hours of interviews—and his sisters sit down with you, as do his...
The Daily
Sep 7, 2017 — “A central tenet of feminist film theory holds that the havoc wreaked on the bodies of women propels narrative storytelling,” writes Holly Willis in the new issue of Film Comment. “The new film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, The Unknown...
The Daily
Jul 12, 2017 — La telenovela errante, a film Raúl Ruiz shot in 1990 (image above) and now fully realized by his widow and editor, Valeria Sarmiento, is one of the highlights of the lineup for this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The seventieth edition...
Features
May 13, 2015 — Cannes is complicated. To the first-time visitor, it seems a blur of parties, dinners, and screenings, and wherever you are, you are constantly troubled by the thought that the really hot screening or the really hip party is happening elsewhere.
Interviews
Aug 20, 2014 — One of John Cassavetes’s loyal troupe of collaborators reminisces about working with the fearless filmmaker.
Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....
May 24, 2011 — In 1938, Charles Chaplin deposited with the Library of Congress a script for a film to be called The Dictator, and told the press it was a project in which he would play a double role. He clearly had Hitler...
Nov 28, 2010 — “What we need are good old American—and that’s not to be confused with European—Art Films.” So declared the then twenty-nine-year-old beatnik Method actor Dennis Hopper in an unpublished 1965 manifesto. “The whole damn country’s one big real place to utilize...
Short Takes
Feb 5, 2010 — Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (Knopf) begins with an epigram that pretty well sums up Altman’s attitude toward “truth” and “realism” in cinema and life. “I don’t think anybody remembers the truth, the facts,” the great filmmaker said. “You remember...
Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...