The Criterion Collection
Film Guides
Jan 6, 2014 — Critics commonly describe Throne of Blood (1957) as Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth. While this description is certainly not untrue, the film is much more than a direct cinematic translation of a literary text. Kurosawa’s movie is a brilliant synthesis...
In Theaters
Nov 7, 2013 — Repertory PicksIf you’ve seen the films in our Eclipse set Pearls of the Czech New Wave, you surely will not have forgotten the lively and profoundly disturbing A Report on the Party and Guests. This was one of the most...
Features
Sep 4, 2013 — Only Ernst Lubitsch got the great comedian to be as funny on the big screen as he was on the radio.
Feb 5, 2013 — Keisuke Kinoshita’s most experimental film is a resplendent, kabuki-inspired, folk-derived drama about mortality.
Essays
Jan 8, 2013 — The two movies that opened the door to “youth culture” in Hollywood, The Graduate and Easy Rider, were milestones, to be sure. But can it really be said that they were milestones in the art of cinema? “I think The...
Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.
Short Takes
Oct 10, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...
Short Takes
May 24, 2010 — Alain Resnais’s 1961 French New Wave masterpiece Last Year at Marienbad has long been one of cinema’s most magnificently inscrutable films, but at least one of its mysteries has now been solved. The actress Françoise Spira, a cast member, documented...
May 18, 2010 — Nicolas Roeg’s first solo outing as a director is an astonishing visual poem, by turns violent, innocent, and elegiac.
Short Takes
Dec 6, 2009 — Jim Ellis’s insightful new book, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (University of Minnesota Press), builds from the premise that “Jarman is the mostimportant Anglo-American gay director in the post-Stonewall era, although it is surprising that, to my knowledge, no one has ever...