The Criterion Collection
Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...
Apr 17, 2012 — When it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista! depicted something previously unseen in American fiction films—the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of view. Though writer-director-cinematographer Robert M. Young was not Latino and didn’t speak Spanish, his film convincingly...
Apr 13, 2012 — Did You See This? • Can La haine save London from more riots? • You can’t kid a kidder, but you can scare a scarer. • (Why can’t every day be) Derek Jarman Day • A Cassavetes Tumblr • Edward...
Apr 13, 2012 — Performances Fists in the Pocket, a gasp-inducing, mouth-frothing, black-comic attack on bourgeois values, is remembered first and foremost as a shocking debut from director Marco Bellocchio. But it gave its star, Lou Castel, a memorable entrance of his own: he...
Mar 27, 2012 — The mysterious letter was signed “Joe.” David Lean’s lawyer had sent me a batch of old correspondence. Struggling with a biography of Lean, I was desperate for any leads, and this one seemed worth following up. But how does one...
Feb 21, 2012 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s only work of science fiction, World on a Wire (1973) is surely one of the most obscure items among the forty-odd titles that constitute his filmography. Originally a two-part miniseries broadcast on West German television, it had...
Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...
Jan 18, 2012 — Poto and Cabengo: Three-Part Harmony Jean-Pierre Gorin’s three Southern California movies are so militantly unclassifiable that terms like documentary or essay film seem as hopelessly out of sync with the recalcitrant and frequently exhilarating works themselves as a Marxist harangue in...
Nov 15, 2011 — Jean Renoir’s masterpiece is a dazzling accomplishment, original in form and style, a comic tragedy, absurd and profound, graced by two of the most brilliant scenes ever created.