The Criterion Collection
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 23, 2009 — This interview, conducted by Michael Henry, first appeared in the May 1978 issue of Positif.
Essays
Mar 30, 2009 — Among the great Polish filmmakers—Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland, Roman Polanski—Andrzej Wajda stands out as the one most concerned with national identity and memory.
Feb 3, 2009 — Luis Buñuel’s surrealist satire is the last film he made in Mexico, the last one in which he used Mexican actors, and most significantly the last one on which he worked with the great Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.
Nov 19, 2008 — My first trip to Paris took place inside the darkened cafeteria of Warnsdorfer Elementary School in East Brunswick, New Jersey. A few times each year, the entire student body was brought together to watch movies cast from a rickety 16...
Essays
Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...
Essays
Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.
Jul 7, 2008 — Every decade since 1984 the Toronto International Film Festival has conducted a poll of film scholars, critics, and directors to determine the ten best movies in the history of Canadian cinema. This top-ten list has changed somewhat over the years,...
May 12, 2008 — Today it may be hard to understand the shock waves that Louis Malle’s romantic drama created with its “frank” depiction of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but in the context of late-1950s France, it was a bombshell.
Apr 21, 2008 — Juan Antonio Bardem combines neorealism with noir thriller to create a new dialect that would forge a new Spanish cinematic language.