The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 21, 1999 — Despite what you may have heard, Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion. (It was no surprise to me to learn...
Aug 12, 1991 — It is 1945. For the first time in four years, the Southern Pacific stops in Black Rock. A one-armed man named John J. MacReedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train. This brooding stranger makes the few residents who inhabit the...
Essays
Jan 7, 1991 — Vittorio de Sica remembers the inspirations behind and the making of his classic film.
Sep 24, 1990 — Imagine Hitchcock’s Psycho told from the point of view of its title character, and you have a rough idea of Taxi Driver. This riveting 1976 film is at once a thriller, a psychological case study, an exploration of the eroticism...
Oct 15, 2050 — Voice-over narration has existed since the beginnings of cinema and has been an integral part of some of the great masterworks of narrative film, from The Magnificent Ambersons to Double Indemnity to Jules and Jim to Taxi Driver. It spans...
Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...
Essays
Jul 9, 2001 — Director Bruce Robinson reminisces about the days that inspired his uproarious black comedy.
Jun 24, 2020 — It was audiences, not critics, that made hits out of such movies as St. Elmo’s Fire (1985), Batman Forever (1995), and Phone Booth (2002).