The Criterion Collection
Dec 16, 2014 — The prolific and popular Keisuke Kinoshita made his fascinating first movies at a time of great difficulty and censorship, yet their spirit and brilliance shine through.
Sneak Peeks
Dec 5, 2014 — A film about garlic? Only Les Blank could pull it off. In this clip from a new supplement on our release Les Blank: Always for Pleasure, we get the story of how Blank’s pungent documentary Garlic Is as Good as...
Sneak Peeks
Dec 2, 2014 — Les Blank’s documentaries focusing on musicians are wonderfully easygoing and authentic. Watching films like A Well Spent Life, a 1971 portrait of Texas blues guitarist Mance Lipscomb, one senses a relationship of total trust between subjects and filmmakers. In this...
Essays
Nov 25, 2014 — More than just observational, Les Blank’s sensual documentaries are personal and participatory celebrations of American culture.
Sneak Peeks
Nov 24, 2014 — There are few greater admirers of the late documentarian Les Blank than the legendary German filmmaker Werner Herzog. (The two were already close when Blank filmed the making of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo for Burden of Dreams.) So we knew we wanted...
In Theaters
Mar 7, 2012 — A celebration of one of the great cosmopolites of the twentieth century, in one of the cosmopolises he adored.
Short Takes
Dec 22, 2011 — Last year, we told you about Daniel Eagan’s rigorous, informative, and very entertaining book America’s Film Legacy, a guide to the titles chosen for the National Film Registry, which was instituted following 1988’s National Film Preservation Act. The tome is...
Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....
Short Takes
Feb 22, 2011 — This week, Time is all too happy to judge a movie by its cover. Gilbert Cruz, an editor at the magazine, has compiled a list called “Top 10 Cool Criterion Collection Covers.” Cruz’s taste in design tends toward illustration over...
Features
Feb 2, 2011 — These tributes first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. They are posted here by permission of the authors. The photographs appear courtesy of Colleen Murphy. Colleen Murphy After we decided to...