The Criterion Collection
Jan 6, 2009 — Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning film is not just an epic but also a small film, one in which, somehow or other, the scope of David Lean has been enriched with the vision of Ozu.
Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.
Essays
Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.
Essays
Nov 23, 2008 — The possession of a real voice is always a marvel, an almost religious thing.
Nov 16, 2008 — Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop-art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the children...
In the late sixties and early seventies, young, innovative, and politically radical directors took up arms against the propriety of West German society and its failing film industry.
Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.
Sep 22, 2008 — With their rotating casts of sourpuss Finns and their stringent compositions, Aki Kaurismäki’s films would seem the least likely candidates for laughs, yet his black-comic precision has made him one of the most warmly embraced filmmakers on the international art-house...
Essays
Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.
Aug 18, 2008 — This modest-scale psychological drama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger follows an explosives expert with a drinking problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness.