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Jul 14, 2017 — Catherine Grant tips us off to Leo Robson’s interview with David Thomson for the January 2017 issue of the White Review. “Hawks is still for me the essential American director of the golden age,” says Thomson, and the conversation’s an...
Essays
Jan 23, 2017 — In his radical debut feature, Ousmane Sembène reveals the agony of the postcolonial experience through the story of a Senegalese migrant abused by her French employers.
Aug 1, 2016 — Back in January, veteran actor Keith Baxter stopped by the Criterion offices for lunch and regaled us with memories of his experience working with Orson Welles.
Jun 17, 2015 — Taking the form of a casual conversation, Louis Malle’s film about transformative experiences is an outgrowth of its writer-stars’ experimental theater days.
Feb 26, 2015 — The threat of death hangs over Watership Down, Martin Rosen’s wise and uncompromising animated adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel about rabbits on a survival mission.
Jun 17, 2013 — The silent legend practices slapstick with clockwork precision in his most iconic, astonishing comedy.
Mar 9, 2012 — The cinematographer tells us how he and Louis Malle went about shooting Vanya on 42nd Street in a decrepit Manhattan theater.
Essays
Feb 17, 2010 — The feature film debut of British artist Steve McQueen, Hunger dramatizes the final weeks in the life of Irish Republican Army commander Bobby Sands and his death by hunger strike, aged twenty-seven, in 1981. Combining intense formal control and extreme...
Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s crime film contains plenty of the requisite genre elements—double-crossings, violence, kidnappings, and gun battles—but it’s also a pensive meditation on age, friendship, and lost opportunities.
Essays
May 13, 2002 — In Barbet Schroeder’s portrait of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, we watch a seemingly amiable, thoroughly pompous despot attempt to transform himself into a figure of heroic proportions.