The Criterion Collection
Production Notes
Oct 15, 2009 — Full-size sidewalks aren’t very common in outer Tokyo, particularly in the many small residential neighborhoods that surround the city for miles. Likely a holdover from when there weren’t as many cars around and people walked in the roads alongside carts...
Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...
Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...
Mar 23, 2009 — The most crowd-pleasing film of François Truffaut’s latter career is also one of his most personal, drawing from his memories of the German occupation of France, his schoolboy years and his lifelong infatuation with the creative arts.
Sep 22, 2008 — With their rotating casts of sourpuss Finns and their stringent compositions, Aki Kaurismäki’s films would seem the least likely candidates for laughs, yet his black-comic precision has made him one of the most warmly embraced filmmakers on the international art-house...
Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.
Jun 30, 2008 — The idea of self-fashioning—of deliberately taking the raw materials of one’s body and mind and transforming them into a work of art—has been with us at least since the Renaissance. Yet no one, not even Oscar Wilde, has so rigorously...
May 26, 2008 — Though producer Alexander Korda’s adventure movie forms part of a continued tradition of representing the East by purposefully occluding the reality of it, it celebrates the Arabian fantasy as a site of childlike wonder.
Oct 31, 2007 — After the mugginess of the New York City summer, and with the launch of the new Criterion web store and the New York Film Festival keeping us all plenty busy through the end of September, Western Australia was a breath...
Essays
Jun 18, 2007 — Yasujiro Ozu had already directed forty-five features by the time he started work on Early Spring, in 1955, but the artistic and commercial success of his previous film, Tokyo Story (1953), had rejuvenated him.