Origin

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Jul 19, 2011 — In May 1956, an Indian film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn’t well attended. The Indian delegation had done little to promote it, arranging only a single midnight screening that clashed with a party in honor of...

Jul 15, 2011 — Cinephiles, man your battle stations: Abel Gance’s legendary silent behemoth Napoleon, which hasn’t been shown theatrically in the U.S. with live accompaniment for nearly thirty years, will be presented by the 2012 San Francisco Silent Film Festival in four special...

Jul 12, 2011 — Heeeere’s Johnny, the desperate, destructive prophet-of-the-apocalypse protagonist of Mike Leigh’s brilliantly corrosive Naked (1993), a sexually explicit update to a long line of British films, plays, and novels about angry young men. Johnny might be mistaken for a mere misanthrope,...

Jul 8, 2011 — Marcel Carné’s rich backstage drama about the theater world of nineteenth-century Paris, Children of Paradise, is back—in a new form. Based on Jacques Prevert’s original scenario, a ballet version of the classic film, choreographed by José Carlos Martinez and scored...

Jun 30, 2011 — Kurosawa’s films are about to get even more graphic. The Criterion Collection and the pop-up art gallery Tr!ckster are joining forces Friday, July 22, for a one-night-only celebration called A Tribute to the Films of Akira Kurosawa. Curated by our own Eric...

Jun 27, 2011 — A rogue’s gallery of vituperative 1950s vixens and night-world tough-guy gargoyles all coalescing in a constellation of twinkling cold war lights, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is a film of a thousand stars. Stars of every sort, size, and description:...

Jun 27, 2011 — Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing, the late silent film People on Sunday (1930) has...

Jun 22, 2011 — Theresa Russell is attracted to the very things that repel most actors. In 1976’s The Last Tycoon, her first movie (and Elia Kazan’s last), she is unafraid of seeming to do very little. Young actresses like to show you they...

Jun 14, 2011 —   The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets   The year is 1954: a fabulous bit of film history is about to unfurl. Grips are...