The Criterion Collection
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.
Short Takes
Nov 24, 2015 — Film scholar David Bordwell has written a terrific new piece for his blog about the incredible influence and evolution of Agnès Varda’s six-decade-long filmmaking career. “Varda is now regarded as a living treasure of world cinema,” Bordwell writes. “Whatever she...
Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...
Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...
The Daily
Jan 5, 2026 — One of France’s biggest stars took the world by storm before her reputation took a turn.
The Daily
Sep 30, 2022 — We’re reading interviews with Garret Bradley and Don Hertzfeldt and a marvelous account of the making of Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).
Sep 22, 2009 — Abandoning the cinematic conventions and references that informed his previous works, Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive crime drama reaches new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention.
Jan 21, 2008 — The feminist politics of Agnès Varda’s marital drama were ahead of their time, but it is on the level of form that the film is so unsettling and calls up contradictory interpretations.
Essays
Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”
Apr 26, 2019 — A politically engaged actor who refused to be commodified, this French icon showcased her piercing intelligence throughout four decades of unforgettable performances.