The Criterion Collection
The Daily
Jul 12, 2017 — La telenovela errante, a film Raúl Ruiz shot in 1990 (image above) and now fully realized by his widow and editor, Valeria Sarmiento, is one of the highlights of the lineup for this year’s Locarno Film Festival. The seventieth edition...
Criterion Designs
Sep 29, 2015 — The combination of deep-rooted anger and intellectual trickiness in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s film called for an artist with an unusual combination of skills.
Essays
Feb 27, 2014 — Roman Polanski’s film is a highly sophisticated adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel, in both its faithfulness and its divergences.
Short Takes
Oct 3, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...
Aug 21, 2012 — Andrew Haigh’s boy-meets-boy story reminds us that the biggest pleasures of falling in love come from the little moments of connection.
Short Takes
Apr 18, 2012 — Though his role in it was small, the Oscar-nominated actor Edward James Olmos (Stand and Deliver, Battlestar Galactica) cites Robert M. Young’s ¡Alambrista! as one of the most important films he’s ever made. This authentic rendering of the workaday lives...
Jun 21, 2011 — Chains: Bound for Glory Film history is replete with artists embraced by critics but misunderstood by the public. For Italian filmmaker Raffaello Matarazzo, it was the opposite. After working for almost two decades as a midlevel studio director of pictures...
Aug 9, 2010 — San Francisco filmmaker Terry Zwigoff’s first cinematic effort, the 1985 Louie Bluie, is a wry, ribald, and magical portrait of the country-blues string band player and irrepressible raconteur Howard Armstrong (a.k.a. Louie Bluie). This catchy, engaging sixty-minute documentary, a clattering...
Feb 11, 2008 — Though today he is most fondly remembered for his later romantic comedies, typifying Hollywood filmmaking in its heyday, it should be known that Ernst Lubitsch was also a pioneer of the modern movie musical.
Essays
Jan 21, 2008 — As late as 1970, Alf Sjöberg’s boldly experimental 1951 adaptation of August Strindberg’s play was declared as inaugurating “a new cinematic language.”