The Criterion Collection
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...
Nov 24, 2009 — For twenty years, the remains of television’s self-proclaimed golden age lay dormant in the vaults of the commercial networks. I remember traveling, as a young researcher for NBC, to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the old shows of the fifties...
Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.
Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...
Nov 27, 2008 — A genuine cause célèbre, adapted from Romain Gary’s 1970 nonfiction novel, Samuel Fuller’s late work is an unusually blunt and suggestively metaphoric account of American racism.
Essays
Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.
Essays
Sep 17, 2007 — Today we are used to seeing dance artistically presented on television and in movies—these films about Martha Graham helped to make that happen.
Aug 13, 2007 — Cría cuervos . . . , Carlos Saura's political and psychological masterpiece, was shot in the summer of 1975, as Spanish dictator Francisco Franco lay dying, and premiered in Madrid's Conde Duque Theatre, on January 26, 1976, forty years after...
Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.
Apr 16, 2007 — Following debates about tensions between police and immigrant communities in France, director Mathieu Kassovitz began a public correspondence with the right-wing minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy.