The Criterion Collection
Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.
Essays
Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...
May 21, 2013 — It’s tough to tell where reality ends and fiction begins in Haskell Wexler’s deft chronicle of a turbulent era.
Essays
Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...
Aug 17, 2009 — Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerman’s film simultaneously allows viewers to...
Is it a genre, a movement, a fashion statement? However one defines noir, its appeal never seems to wane.
Aug 12, 2019 — Carlos Reygadas is a Mexican film director, writer, and producer. He studied law in Mexico City and later, in London, specialized in armed conflict law and the use of force. After quitting the Mexican foreign service he made four short...
Short Takes
Jan 6, 2016 — Celebrated English playwright, actor, screenwriter, and composer Noël Coward brought us many cinema classics, but his relationship with the medium was far from straightforward, as Coward scholar Barry Day explains in a post at Literary Hub.
Jan 1, 2007 — I’ve started writing this several times, and each time I’ve gotten diverted. Originally, I wrote about our troops in Iraq and the fact that we had sent along DVDs for the holidays, but I had a hard time equating our...