Old Well

May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...

May 11, 2010 — The great Japanese actor Kei Sato passed away last week; he was eighty-one years old. You may not recognize Sato’s name, but if you’ve seen a Japanese film in the past fifty years, there’s a reasonably good chance you’ve fallen,...

Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...

Apr 20, 2010 — In 1992, I went to Paris to see some movies that weren’t turning up on these shores, at least not as quickly as I wanted them to. At the time, it meant something particular to be going to Paris to...

Apr 13, 2010 — Indefatigably political Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, best known for 1966’s truly revolutionary The Battle of Algiers, once stated that “the ideal director should be three-quarters Rossellini and one-quarter Eisenstein.” Certainly, one can see traces of the work of both of...

Mar 30, 2010 — The work of Pedro Costa has progressed in slow, measured steps, but each step has been a giant leap. His slowness is both the condition and the consequence of ethical standards he shares with precious few directors of his generation....

Mar 23, 2010 — In the Akira Kurosawa movie family tree, Sanjuro is the sassy kid brotherto Yojimbo, and like many lighthearted younger siblings, it’s underrated. After Yojimbo achieved blockbuster status in 1961, Kurosawa took a story he’d already developed, about a semistrong but...

Mar 17, 2010 — 1. A Park—Night A man aflame is running directly toward camera. This image, which comes from Nicholas Ray’s initial treatment for Rebel Without a Cause, might stand at the head of almost any of Ray’s movies, since it so clearly...

Mar 17, 2010 — Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Caroline! Caroline’s pick for a work of Western literature she wishes Kurosawa had adapted was Oedipus Rex: I would love to have seen Kurosawa do Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Honestly, I think that he is the only...

Mar 8, 2010 — Congratulations to Friday’s winner, Dan! Dan’s caption for this screenshot from Throne of Blood was: The Emperor initially resisted the switch from plastic bags to cloth. March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker...