My First Film

Mar 11, 2016 — Valley of Love (2015), dir. Guillaume Nicloux “Filmmaking is a collective assemblage of desires,” said Isabelle Huppert when we sat down to talk on a recent morning. We were speaking about how she picks her roles, and how her own intuition...

Dec 1, 2009 — This nonfiction masterwork by David and Albert Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin is a terrifying snapshot of the sudden collapse of the sixties.

Dec 1, 2009 — In the eight films he’s made since 1991, Arnaud Desplechin has been developing a visionary world, a personal style that goes against the grain of standard cinematic practice today. He’s a master of ensemble mise-en-scène and a brilliant director of...

Apr 17, 2013 — Four of the great Japanese director’s lesser-known, early films show the coming into being of a political artist.

Apr 23, 2009 — This interview, conducted by Michael Henry, first appeared in the May 1978 issue of Positif.

Dec 20, 2017 — Over the past decade, contemporary Greek cinema has erupted onto the international film stage with a new vanguard of directors whose bold works share a taste for provocation and highly stylized worlds. This week on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck,...

Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.

Sep 4, 2019 — With their novelistic density and sexual openness, the films of French master André Téchiné introduced director Stephen Cone to a strange new world of contradictions.

Apr 5, 2017 — At eighty-eight years old, Agnès Varda is still blossoming as an artist. Long known primarily as a filmmaker, a vocation she took up more than half a century ago, the French iconoclast is now in what she gleefully describes as...

Nov 20, 2008 — We asked director Rian Johnson, whose “high school noir” Brick was one of the most acclaimed films of 2006, what his favorite Criterion releases were. Johnson wrote to us: “I'm a huge Criterion fan. My first exposure to many of...