The Criterion Collection
May 27, 2017 — “When French writer Delphine le Vigan published her book Based on a True Story in 2015, some critics dubbed it ‘a Hitchcockian novel,’” begins Jonathan Romney, writing for Screen. “It’s not surprising, then, that Roman Polanski’s adaptation is very Hitchcockian...
The Daily
May 25, 2017 — “The act of seeing has a special meaning in Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s Radiance, in which the job of character Misako (Ayame Misaki) is to write the scripts for the audio-assist provided for blind patrons at the movies,” writes Barbara...
Short Takes
Feb 24, 2017 — Cinema lost one of its most venerated maestros of excess last week with the passing of director Seijun Suzuki, whose signature films from the 1960s exploded the conventions of the Japanese studio system. While honing his craft in dozens of...
Nov 15, 2016 — Akira Kurosawa lays bare his deepest fears in this visually astonishing interpretation of folklore, myth, and the director’s own dreams and memories.
Essays
Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.
Sep 1, 2016 — Balancing epic scale with lyrical intimacy, Orson Welles inflects the spirit of Shakespeare’s history plays with his own zest for cinematic invention.
Jul 25, 2016 — In his masterful reimagining of the story of John Smith and Pocahontas, Terrence Malick meditates on the nature of beauty and America’s path from innocence to experience.
Nov 18, 2015 — Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood applied cinematic specificity and flair to the literary realism of Truman Capote’s classic “nonfiction novel.”
Jul 23, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s miraculous, melancholy musical is the rare film to use pastiche and artifice to go straight for the heart.
Production Notes
Mar 5, 2014 — A few years ago, as I was collaborating on the Criterion release of Last Year at Marienbad, I had the chance to meet Alain Resnais. We had released Hiroshima mon amour and Night and Fog a few years earlier, and...