The Criterion Collection
Aug 14, 2006 — It’s both hard and not so hard to believe that Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales were conceived—indeed, written initially—as a novel. On the one hand, he’s the grand master of dialogue as an instrument of narrative. His characters muse, reflect, analyze,...
Essays
Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s World War II–era drama follows a young collaborationist in rural France and asks how people with no interest in politics become active participants in brutal torture.
Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.
Essays
Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...
Mar 22, 1993 — Elizabethan prodigal prodigy Christopher Marlowe, whose tantalizingly brief life ended in political assassination, wrote a history play, in the mid-1590s, about the 1327 political assassinations of England’s Edward II and his lover and boyhood friend, Piers Gaveston. Rarely performed, Edward...
Oct 29, 1990 — Luis Buñuel’s ode to obsessive love is injected with the biting subversive wit, symbolism, originality and surreal touches that distinguish his finest achievements.
Essays
Jun 13, 1988 — G. W. Pabst lends humanity and depth to his adaptation of a play by Bertolt Brecht—one of the last great works of German cinema's richest period.