The Criterion Collection
Jun 20, 2011 — Genres collide in the great Hollywood movies of the midfifties cold-war thaw. With the truce in Korea and the red scare on the wane, ambitious directors seemed freer to mix and match and even ponder the new situation. The western...
Short Takes
Aug 2, 2010 — The great, beloved screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico died this past weekend at the age of ninety-six. A longtime collaborator of Luchino Visconti’s (they’re pictured together above), including on the epic The Leopard (1963), Cecchi D’Amico worked with just about every...
Jun 10, 2010 — Fans of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s films (which really should include any lover of cinema) have reason to celebrate. The long-gestating website devoted to the Danish director, Carl Th. Dreyer—The Man and His Work, launched at the end of May and...
Apr 27, 2009 — The idea of making a film about Japan’s most famous sex crime, with a decent budget and in conditions of complete freedom, reawakened Nagisa Oshima’s desire to direct—and the prospect of circumventing Japanese censorship must have made the decision even...
Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s late work is a masterful amalgam of high international modernism and traditional Japanese fine arts.
Essays
Jun 25, 2007 — Taking the form of apocalyptic science fiction typical of the Cold War era, Chris Marker’s singular film is simultaneously a philosophical fiction, genre exercise, and treatise on cinematic time.
Essays
May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.
Essays
Jul 19, 2004 — In Yasujiro Ozu’s hands, the extended-family drama widened its focus to encompass friends, neighbors, and employers.
Essays
Feb 16, 2004 — Henri-Georges Clouzot took the standard ingredients of the Continental-Films detective movies and used them to make something darker and more complex—to make, in fact, the first classic French film noir.