The Criterion Collection
Mar 24, 2016 — With Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day finally available in the U.S., screenwriter Hung Hung talks about his working relationship with Yang, the film’s truncated distribution and slow path to acclaim, and the real-life roots of its narrative.
Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.
Jan 19, 2016 — Inside Llewyn Davis takes its protagonist on a Hero’s Journey of characteristically Coen-esque proportions—a voyage at turns serious and comic, and framed by an exquisitely curated selection of folk melodies.
Jan 13, 2016 — In Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis focused his lens on the world of Italy’s female rice workers, for a story that’s part social commentary, part pulp melodrama—and introduced the world to a dazzling young actress named Silvana Mangano.
Dec 15, 2015 — Burroughs: The Movie, the culmination of late director Howard Brookner’s NYU thesis project, follows William S. Burroughs over the course of five years and provides “an authorial profile such as has never been and may never be matched.”
Essays
Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...
Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.
Sep 24, 2015 — Bruce Beresford critiques the British colonialist era in this precise, layered adaptation of a 1939 novel by Joyce Cary.
Essays
Sep 22, 2015 — Two precocious youngsters try to carve out a corner of the world just for themselves in Wes Anderson’s alternately melancholy and boisterous tale of growing pains.
Short Takes
Aug 5, 2015 — Night and the City was made in 1950, under circumstances almost as tense as those in the film. Knowing he was about to be blacklisted during the Communist witch hunts of the McCarthy era, director Jules Dassin fled to London,...