The Criterion Collection
Nov 15, 2011 — Jean Renoir’s masterpiece is a dazzling accomplishment, original in form and style, a comic tragedy, absurd and profound, graced by two of the most brilliant scenes ever created.
Aug 9, 2011 — Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary epic commemorates the popular uprising that had succeeded in ousting the French from Algeria in July 1962.
Short Takes
Jun 10, 2011 — Here’s a treat for all connoisseurs of American big screens: Flavorpill has compiled a list of the best movie theaters in the country. The editors talked to friends and colleagues around the country to get their votes, and based their...
The creator of perhaps cinema’s most purely spiritual works, this Danish master made films that explored the eternal battle between the spirit and the flesh.
Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.
Oct 23, 2010 — In 1945, a teenage Stanley Kubrick was given a job as staff photographer at Look magazine, where he published more than nine hundred striking images, most of them in the realist style of New York School street photography. By the...
Features
Sep 23, 2010 — I work closely on the Eclipse series, and one of the great privileges of that task is the chance to delve into the films and careers of artists I was previously only passingly acquainted with. Allan King is a supreme...
Sep 21, 2010 — Warrendale: Man of ActionAllan King was one of cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality, but the term documentary seems too puny to describe the intense, passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality. King’s early nonfiction features are...
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...
To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy families are all alike: they’re really boring to watch on-screen. Thus, cinema is besotted with deliciously unhappy ones.