The Criterion Collection
Nov 12, 2007 — I’ve always been fascinated by the details of getting places. Bill Becker would often say that the best part of a trip for me was getting there and back—what happened while I was there was less important. Figuring out how...
Essays
Aug 20, 2007 — David Mamet’s debut film was a welcome throwback to the primacy of character and careful story construction, at a time when narrative intricacy was in short supply on American movie screens.
Aug 13, 2007 — Samuel Fuller knew how to handle a gun from his army days, and this experience colored all of his filmmaking, which he began at the age of thirty-six.
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...
Jul 23, 2007 — It’s hard to think of an artist who better exemplifies the obscuring ebb and flow of film history than Raymond Bernard.
Jul 9, 2007 — The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker,...
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 21, 2007 — In January 1948, British film producer Sir Alexander Korda, head of British-Lion and London Film Productions, commissioned novelist Graham Greene to write and research “an original postwar continental story to be based on either or both of the following territories:...
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.
Jan 22, 2007 — A delightfully old-fashioned morality tale, Robert Day’s low-budget space flick is far more than the standard monster fare it was initially sold as.