The Criterion Collection
Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.
Essays
Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.
Essays
Nov 27, 2008 — Despite Samuel Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, his twenty-first feature was the first to suffer outright suppression.
Nov 27, 2008 — A genuine cause célèbre, adapted from Romain Gary’s 1970 nonfiction novel, Samuel Fuller’s late work is an unusually blunt and suggestively metaphoric account of American racism.
Nov 27, 2008 — An enormous welter of insoluble problems is on display in Luis Buñuel’s classic—the ending solves nothing; the story just begins again.
Essays
Nov 23, 2008 — The possession of a real voice is always a marvel, an almost religious thing.
Essays
Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.
Sep 30, 2008 — 9 August 2008: I go to the neighborhood theater to see Snow Trail (a.k.a. To the End of the Silver Mountains, a.k.a. Ginrei no haté), a 1946 Senkichi Taniguchi film now revived because it was Toshiro Mifune’s second film. Revived...
Sep 29, 2008 — After Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, some thirty-two diaries were discovered. They were from 1933 to 1963, and though a few years were missing, they offer a commentary on the life of the director and reveal...
Essays
Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.