The Interview

Apr 23, 2014 — Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso, coming out next week in a Criterion edition, was an inspiration for Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning Sideways. Being such a fan of the film, which is beloved in Italy but underappreciated here in the U.S., Payne agreed...

Feb 6, 2014 — Who better to explain what an auteur of the cinema is than one of the originators of auteur theory? In his famous 1954 essay “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” published in Cahiers du cinéma five years before the release...

Dec 10, 2013 — In 1998, I interviewed Little Edie Beale, the surviving star of 1976’s Grey Gardens, one of the Maysles brothers’ numerous masterworks (Gimme Shelter, Meet Marlon Brando, and With Love from Truman are equal in technical and emotional innovation). Miss Beale,...

Jun 19, 2013 — In a new supplement recorded in 2013 for the Criterion Collection, we catch up with Magda Vášáryová, who was a teenager when she played the title character in František Vlácil’s Czechoslovak New Wave landmark Marketa Lazarová. In this clip from...

Nov 7, 2012 — In this clip from the recent documentary A Testimony as an Image, which reunites members of the Rashomon crew nearly sixty years after Akira Kurosawa’s epochal film was made, lighting and electrical technician Genkon Nakaoka describes the four hours of...

Jul 18, 2012 — John Lurie reminisces about making Down by Law and Fishing with John.

Jun 20, 2012 — I have John Schlesinger to thank for my role in Harold and Maude. I’d been in Sunday Bloody Sunday for John. He had given Hal Ashby my name to look up when Hal was interviewing all the famous English dames...

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,...

Apr 18, 2011 — An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King;   a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady;   a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest,   a Musket...

Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...