The Best Years

Apr 22, 2013 — Restoration SpotlightShot in VistaVision and Technicolor, Richard III is the most eye-catching of Laurence Olivier’s essential big-screen Shakespeare adaptations. For years, it couldn’t be seen in its original glory, due to lost footage, faded colors, chemical staining, and missing frames....

Jan 16, 2013 — Restoration Spotlight Criterion’s new restoration of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much was a project many years in the making. Since the original negative is missing, the first challenge was to find the best possible source...

Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...

Nov 6, 2012 — When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, produce some of the greatest films ever made, and exert a tremendous and lasting influence on filmmaking...

Oct 9, 2012 — British wartime audiences ate up these rule-breaking costume pictures—entertainments for a populace seeking escapism.

Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.

Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.

Apr 24, 2012 — An unverifiable, if heartfelt, assertion: For the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (or from Rome Open City to Fellini Satyricon), the world’s greatest popular cinema was produced in Italy—a realm of glamorous superstars, sensational comedians, and great genre flicks....

Mar 9, 2012 — The cinematographer tells us how he and Louis Malle went about shooting Vanya on 42nd Street in a decrepit Manhattan theater.

Dec 6, 2011 — The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the film that best exemplifies Alfred Htchcock’s often-asserted desire to offer audiences not a slice of life but a slice of cake. Even Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, in their pioneering study of Hitchcock, for...