The Criterion Collection
Essays
Aug 31, 2012 — He was a doctor, explorer, and anthropologist in addition to being a director. Learn more about the fascinating man who made Lonesome.
Apr 25, 2012 — Pearls of the Deep: Alumni AssociationIn the mid-1960s, there was a brief window during which a remarkable cinema of ideas and visual experimentation flourished in Communist Czechoslovakia. This fecund period lasted approximately five years, from 1963 to 1968, when it...
Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...
Mar 13, 2012 — In the becalmed atmosphere of today’s Hollywood, it’s hard to imagine the tumult that greeted The Last Temptation of Christ when it was released in 1988. Brilliantly directed by Martin Scorsese, this adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s imaginative retelling of the...
Feb 22, 2012 — When it comes to depicting actual people’s jobs, the truism goes, Hollywood gets everything wrong with stunning regularity. The rare exception is Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959), widely considered among the finest trial films ever made, and maybe...
Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...
Features
Dec 26, 2011 — Noël Coward’s play Design for Living was produced for Broadway in 1933, starring Coward, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne. But it started life back in 1921. Coward was on his first impoverished visit to America. He arrived in New York...
Essays
Nov 22, 2011 — The title of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore refers to the ivy-covered prep school attended by the film’s central character, Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman). Max, with his bushy eyebrows and imposing glasses, loves his school beyond reason and is Rushmore’s number one...
Nov 15, 2011 — Jean Renoir’s masterpiece is a dazzling accomplishment, original in form and style, a comic tragedy, absurd and profound, graced by two of the most brilliant scenes ever created.
Nov 15, 2011 — You make films to give people something, to transport them somewhere else, and it doesn’t matter if you transport them to a world of intuition or a world of the intellect.Krzysztof Kieślowski said that he did not care about cinema,...