A Dream

Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.

Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.

Jul 10, 2006 — In his unpredictable daily encounters with the gorilla Koko and her teacher, Barbet Schroeder foregrounds the quiddity of Koko’s situation in episodic fashion.

Apr 17, 2006 — In the absence of a finished, definitive edit of Orson Welles’s enigmatic project, three writers dive into the unsolvable mystery of the film and the different versions presented in the Criterion edition.

Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.

Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.

Sep 29, 2003 — “Gray literature” is the term German film historians use to describe the material written purely for publicity purposes and made available to the press, but not meant for official publication. Often this gray literature, which is only accessible to film...

Jan 7, 1991 — Roman Polanski’s riposte to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was greeted as a brilliant, grisly potboiler that gave the thirty-two-year-old Polish filmmaker commercial entry to the West.

Dec 18, 1989 — Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s musical was the first to present a panoramic history of America from the Mississippi levees of the 1880s to the Broadway of the 1920s.

Jan 4, 1988 — The Secret Agent (1936) came to life in the prime of Alfred Hitchcock’s British period. It arrived between the popular triumph of The 39 Steps and the box-office rejection of Sabotage, a more daringly downbeat work. Secret Agent partakes of...