The Criterion Collection
Apr 12, 2011 — With his 1970 gangster epic Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.
Jan 11, 2011 — His most personal film as well as the final one to deal with the German occupation of France, Jean-Pierre Melville’s thriller showcases human consciousness grappling with mortality.
Dec 1, 2009 — In the eight films he’s made since 1991, Arnaud Desplechin has been developing a visionary world, a personal style that goes against the grain of standard cinematic practice today. He’s a master of ensemble mise-en-scène and a brilliant director of...
Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...
Oct 6, 2008 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career.
May 26, 2008 — Though producer Alexander Korda’s adventure movie forms part of a continued tradition of representing the East by purposefully occluding the reality of it, it celebrates the Arabian fantasy as a site of childlike wonder.
Essays
Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.
Apr 23, 2007 — Louis Malle’s documentary work adopts certain tenets of cinéma direct—improvisation, minimal crew, the refusal to organize reality—and applies them to a consistently class-conscious, outsider perspective.
Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.
Sep 29, 2003 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his final energies to bringing the lost, gray years of postwar Germany back to life.