The Criterion Collection
In Theaters
Jun 9, 2016 — Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller has given us some of the most transcendent images ever captured on-screen. Since beginning his career in the late sixties, he has lensed a wealth of indelible moments—from Harry Dean Stanton wandering alone through the vast...
Features
Mar 19, 2015 — The author recalls his encounters and correspondence with the filmmaker.
Essays
Dec 2, 2013 — With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.
Essays
Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...
Nov 8, 2011 — Upon its release in the U.S. in 1983, the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander generated a wealth of controversy. Bergman has always seemed to breed conflict among cineastes (Phillip Lopate, for example, has written recently about the...
Aug 9, 2011 — Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary epic commemorates the popular uprising that had succeeded in ousting the French from Algeria in July 1962.
Jul 21, 2011 — Performances When people talk about Mike Leigh’s Naked, the conversation is inevitably focused on David Thewlis’s nerve-shredding, tour de force central performance as the callous drifter Johnny, who slices through life like a straight razor. Yet consider how impossible his...
Essays
Jul 12, 2011 — Naked is the angriest, most bitterly critical attack on the false values of society that Mike Leigh, Britain’s constant chronicler of the tragic comedy of desperate lives, has ever made. Its audacity is that the attack is mounted through a...
Short Takes
Apr 27, 2011 — As those immersed in American film culture know, Austin, Texas, has been a growing hub of activity for the past twenty years. With the Austin Film Society, such locally based filmmakers as Richard Linklater and John Pierson, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the Austin Film Festival, the city...
Feb 8, 2011 — Federico Fellini was born and brought up in Rimini, Italy, a small seaside town in the province of Emilia-Romagna. Amarcord is a neologism he contrived, which comes closest to the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect phrase mi ricordo (I remember). Fellini, a great...