The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Sep 13, 2012 — Horror fans might assume that director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies wrote the book on cursed bibles of the damned. But years earlier, in 1967, The Equinox . . . A Journey into the Supernatural, one of the films in this week’s...
Sep 7, 2012 — Did You See This? • We are very impressed. • Talking cult cinema with Eating Raoul’s Mary Woronov • Some fantastic out-of-the-way theaters, from the underground to the grandiose • Digging deeper with Cronenberg • Mailer’s unorthodox Hamptons excursion •...
Sep 4, 2012 — Umberto D. is perhaps the most astringent film ever made about a poor old man and his dog. Critics today tend to like the astringent parts: the long, deliberately undramatic sequences full of mundane activity (such as a housemaid’s morning...
Sneak Peeks
Aug 15, 2012 — The idea that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have an uncanny ability to get right on top of the action in a scene without their camera’s ever feeling intrusive—to actors or viewers—is a common refrain in discussions of the Belgian directors’...
Essays
Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.
Jul 24, 2012 — Trained as a musician, Jean Grémillon became one of French cinema’s most lyrical artists. His most beloved films were made during World War II.
Jul 6, 2012 — Samuel Fuller wrote this extraordinary “interview” piece shortly after White Dog was completed. It appeared in issue 19 of the journal Framework in 1982, with this introduction: “The director of Paramount’s White Dog interviewed the title actor of the movie...
Sneak Peeks
Jun 22, 2012 — As is evident from his intensely personal theater and film work, Spalding Gray always laid himself bare to his audiences. But it’s unlikely you’ll ever get more up close and personal than with the following footage of the man’s eye...
Jun 18, 2012 — Theater’s ultimate autobiographer, Spalding Gray, and cinema’s invisible-man auteur, Steven Soderbergh, teamed up for an eye-opening movie monologue.
Jun 18, 2012 — One Scene With a background in photography, I was initially attracted to the visual elements of cinema. But the first time I worked with great actors, my interest immediately shifted. Now, capturing a performance is all that matters to me;...