The Criterion Collection
Jul 29, 2014 — Combining a tragic romance and the story of a workers’ strike, this musical melodrama is perhaps Jacques Demy’s most neglected masterpiece.
Essays
Apr 8, 2014 — In telling the story of the young outcast Antoine Doinel, François Truffaut was moving both backward and forward in time—recalling his own experience while forging a filmic language that would grow more sophisticated throughout the 1960s.
Mar 24, 2014 — Rome is as exquisite as it is suffocating in Paolo Sorrentino’s profound tale of contemporary entropy.
Essays
Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...
Essays
Jan 7, 2014 — Satyajit Ray was ailing when he made them, but these three works from the great filmmaker’s final years show an artist at the height of his powers.
Oct 23, 2013 — If there’s one quality that separates John Cassavetes’s movies from almost everybody else’s, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no lapses...
Sep 26, 2013 — Roberto Rossellini officially left neorealism behind with his modern masterpiece, an intimate tale of marriage on the rocks.
Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.
Short Takes
Oct 18, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled the results. The top fifty movies in the 2012 critics’ list, unveiled August 1, include...
Sep 19, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s tale of love and devilry in medieval France was a sensation during the German occupation.