The Criterion Collection
Essays
Oct 25, 2011 — The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.
Aug 30, 2011 — “It is much less a film than it is myself,” Jean Cocteau wrote to a friend at the time he was making Orpheus (1950), “a kind of projection of the things that are important to me.” As with many of...
Oct 12, 2010 — Ingmar Bergman’s Ansiktet (1958)—the title literally translates as The Face, though in North America it was released as The Magician—is arguably one of his most underrated achievements. Its undeservedly lowly standing may perhaps be attributed to its chronological position in...
Essays
May 27, 2010 — Dismiss from your mind, momentarily at least, the John Ford we know, who could define himself with the three words “I make westerns.” Before Stagecoach (1939), Ford’s talking pictures played out in submarines, penitentiaries, and Scottish castles, in Mesopotamia, colonial...
Oct 18, 2009 — So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...
May 5, 2009 — Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.
Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...
Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.
Essays
Mar 15, 2004 — This Japanese classic’s guiding passion is hunger, and its central image—a gaping black hole in the earth—is that of an all-consuming maw.
Nov 6, 1989 — If you had to choose one movie to have with you while stranded on an island, the choice might well be Lawrence of Arabia. Considered by many as one of the greatest films ever made, it received seven Academy Awards...