The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki’s drama sees sexuality as a potent anarchic force that, in its implacable selfishness, brushes aside any sort of order or discipline.
Essays
Jun 27, 2005 — Like his earlier adaptations of Terence Rattigan plays, Anthony Asquith’s late work is bereft of heavy-handed directorial flourishes.
Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.
Essays
Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”
Aug 18, 2003 — The two versions of Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist romance offer case studies in Hollywood and European sensibilities as they existed in the early 1950s.
Essays
Sep 23, 2002 — René Clair’s early sound film is an iconic vision of lower-class Paris bursting with charm and romance.
Essays
Apr 29, 2002 — Though set in wartime Soviet Union, Grigori Chukhrai’s drama walks away from the genre of war film, creating a portrait of life and problems behind the lines of battle.
Essays
Feb 11, 2002 — Miloš Forman’s film is an amazing balancing act of subtle social satire and adolescent romantic longing, of blank despair and irrepressible hope.
Essays
Feb 11, 2002 — The last, best, and funniest movie Milos Forman would make in his native Czechoslovakia is a deceptively simple miniature.
Essays
Oct 29, 2001 — Peter Medak’s stinging satire is unashamedly theatrical, emerging from a fascinating period in English culture when theatre and cinema together were mining a rich vein of flamboyant self-analysis.