Japan and the Japanese

Apr 28, 2021 — Channel Calendars Next month, the Criterion Channel celebrates independent, pathbreaking, and underappreciated artists. We’ve got a retrospective devoted to Gena Rowlands (pictured), the indie-film legend whose acting blurred the line between life and performance; a centenary tribute to the great...

Oct 28, 2019 — This year’s Tokyo International Film Festival salutes two singular directors, both in their eighties now but still going strong.

Jan 29, 2018 — New York. The Metrograph’s “essential series Tell Me: Women Filmmakers, Women’s Stories gets its title from a 1980 documentary by Chantal Akerman called Dis-Moi, which is one of the earliest filmed works of oral history about the Holocaust,” writes Richard...

Jan 18, 2018 — The lineups for the sixty-eighth Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 15 through 25, are coming hard and fast now. Today sees rollouts for the Forum, the main attraction for many a cinephile, and the Berlinale Series. With descriptions...

Oct 21, 2015 — Masaki Kobayashi takes on broken vows and the unreality of the past in his sensual and spooky four-part adaptation of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese folktales.

Apr 24, 2015 — Atypical in style and subject, Yasujiro Ozu’s early crime dramas show a future master brilliantly experimenting with camera and editing.

One of Japan’s most important filmmakers, Kenji Mizoguchi created a cinema rich in technical mastery and social commentary, specifically regarding the place of women in Japanese society.

Dec 28, 1993 — In his touchstone of postwar Japanese cinema, Kenji Mizoguchi uses woman’s fate to reveal the human cost of oppression.

Oct 2, 2007 — Longtime Criterionites remember the days when we were a part of the Voyager Company. Voyager had a long history of innovations, hooking up laserdisc players to early Macintosh computers to explore the world’s museums or inventing interactive software to explore...

Jul 16, 2019 — Armando Iannucci will open London, and Locarno and Venice are preparing their 2019 lineups