The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 22, 2016 — The result of a notoriously troubled production, Marlon Brando’s unorthodox western presents a brooding vision of human futility.
Nov 14, 2016 — For his first foray into romantic comedy, Paul Thomas Anderson worked closely with Jon Brion on a score that combines melodic orchestration with startling dissonance.
Short Takes
Sep 30, 2016 — Did You See This? In anticipation of the fifty-fourth annual New York Film Festival, opening tonight, Indiewire has surveyed the must-see films playing in the revivals section, including Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment,...
Sneak Peeks
Jan 14, 2016 — For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders had his...
Aug 13, 2015 — The films Agnès Varda made while living on the West Coast of the United States are some of the most searching and challenging of her stellar career.
Mar 29, 2013 — When the world’s favorite comedian asked his audience to see him as a sociopathic serial killer, he was venturing where cinema had barely dared to tread.
Sneak Peeks
Mar 14, 2013 — Ministry of Fear, now available for the first time on DVD and Blu-ray in the U.S., was the eighth film Fritz Lang made in Hollywood after emigrating from Germany in 1936. It was also, as author Joe McElhaney (The Death...
Features
Jul 8, 2011 — I was scared to death about The Lady Eve. I happen to love pratfalls, but as almost everything I like, other people dislike, and vice versa, my dearest friends and severest critics constantly urged me to cut the pratfalls down...
Feb 7, 2011 — Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable...
Features
Aug 13, 2010 — The Docks of New York When John Grierson, the Scotsman whose absolute devotion to realism on film—he coined the word documentary and created the National Film Board of Canada—was asked how he’d enjoyed a screening of a now-lost Josef von Sternberg...