The Criterion Collection
Feb 20, 2017 — Joan Crawford delivers one of her greatest performances in Michael Curtiz’s unsparing look at class, ambition, and the all-consuming intensity of maternal love.
Essays
Apr 27, 2016 — In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.
Short Takes
Nov 1, 2015 — Forty years ago today, we lost Pier Paolo Pasolini—the celebrated Italian filmmaker, actor, poet, novelist, journalist, playwright, painter, and public intellectual. On November 2, 1975, Pasolini was found brutally murdered on a beach in Ostia, Italy, just weeks before the...
Sneak Peeks
Dec 24, 2014 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s poignant Morning for the Osone Family looks at grief over World War II from the perspective of one Japanese family. Shot immediately following the country’s surrender, when directors like Kinoshita were no longer under the thumb of wartime...
Essays
Jul 15, 2014 — Among the brainiest of all horror movies, David Cronenberg’s film goes beyond shock to investigate a disturbing world of psychic mutation.
Apr 27, 2014 — A leading light of commedia all’italiana, Dino Risi specialized in fleet, satirical takes on contemporary Italian culture, and this road-trip smash was his most trenchant.
Sneak Peeks
Aug 13, 2013 — No filmmaker in history has been able to wrap an audience around his finger like Alfred Hitchcock. In honor of the Master of Suspense’s birthday (he would be 114 today), here’s a delightful clip from The Illustrated Hitchcock, a 1972...
Jul 8, 2013 — With its marvelous, distinctive camera work, Kenji Mizoguchi’s searing drama is as technically remarkable as it is humane.
Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.
Mar 9, 2012 — The cinematographer tells us how he and Louis Malle went about shooting Vanya on 42nd Street in a decrepit Manhattan theater.