The Criterion Collection
Apr 26, 2010 — In the late 1940s, driven by the opening-night ovations for A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams embarked on more than a decade of immense success. During this period, he wrote at a furious pace: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo,...
Short Takes
Apr 20, 2010 — Ingmar Bergman’s intense, character-based chamber drama Through a Glass Darkly has always seemed like it would make for a great, intimate theater piece. Apparently, Australian playwright Andrew Upton (husband of Cate Blanchett) agrees; he has scripted an adaptation of Bergman’s film...
Short Takes
Apr 19, 2010 — Post-Avatar, it seems some of our favorite filmmakers have caught 3-D fever. Just in the past week, it’s been confirmed that Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, and Werner Herzog will soon be getting us to wear goggles. Scorsese’s excursion into the third...
Feb 24, 2010 — Major Barbara: Stage to Screen It was one of the most improbable linkups in the history of either theater or cinema—as unlikely as Andrew Undershaft’s turning over his munitions empire to Adolphus Cusins, his not-quite-yet son-in-law (and newly declared “foundling”),...
Dec 10, 2009 — Upon its U.S. release in the fall of 1969, Costa-Gavras’s Z made a splash unprecedented for a non-Hollywood film: star Yves Montand talked it up to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, and the film went on to gross $2.2...
Essays
Nov 22, 2009 — “The most concrete emblem of every economic cycle is the dump,” writes Naples native and best-selling Italian muckraker Roberto Saviano somewhere near the conclusion of his extraordinary 2006 “nonfiction novel” Gomorrah, a seethingly cogent and literarily constructed indictment of the...
Short Takes
Nov 2, 2009 — Ang Lee has confirmed that his next film will be an adaptation of Yann Martel’s mammoth best-seller Life of Pi, the fanciful tale of a young boy from Pondicherry, India, who survives a shipwreck only to be stranded in a...
Interviews
Oct 22, 2009 — Almost a decade ago, Catherine Breillat, one of contemporary cinema’s great provocateurs, gave us Fat Girl (À ma soeur!), a disturbing and graphic look at the pitfalls of adolescent sexuality from the point of view of a pair of young sisters....
Essays
Sep 17, 2009 — Director René Clément had conveyed the darker aspects of human nature in 1952’s heartbreaking Forbidden Games, which became an international, award-winning hit despite the rawness and melancholy of its antiwar message. The bitter irony and willingness to grapple with the...
Aug 18, 2009 — In the late 1970s, during the long years of waiting for international and domestic funding to come together to produce Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa returned to the pastime of his youth—he painted. Working fast and furiously, each day turning out scores...