The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Oct 11, 2012 — On October 11, 1987, David Mamet’s first film, the diabolically tricky House of Games, made its U.S. premiere as the closing-night selection of the New York Film Festival. Mamet had already conquered the world of theater, winning a Pulitzer Prize...
Sep 26, 2012 — Countercultural icons Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov makes square subversive in Bartel’s cult classic.
Production Notes
Jul 18, 2012 — John Lurie reminisces about making Down by Law and Fishing with John.
May 30, 2012 — Our video series featuring filmmakers and friends Robert Downey Sr. and Paul Thomas Anderson discussing the films in the Eclipse set Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr. wraps up with an installment focusing on the most successful film of...
May 29, 2012 — Harriet Andersson’s Monika is both an erotic object and an empowered female protagonist in Bergman’s groundbreaker.
Essays
Mar 27, 2012 — Written in five or six days in 1941, in a seaside hotel where he had gone to get away from the Blitz, and by all accounts scarcely revised before being mounted some six weeks later, Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit became...
Dec 13, 2011 — Just what is it that makes Seijun Suzuki’s Tokyo Drifter (1966) so different, so appealing? The cherubic hero in the neat powder blue suit, who looks like he was torn out of a yakuza pop-up book? That hauntingly cornball theme...
Essays
Nov 22, 2011 — 12 Angry Men (1957), the first feature film directed by the legendary Sidney Lumet, is a Hollywood classic that, ironically, helped to define an era of filmmaking grounded in the gritty realism and frenetic energy of urban New York. A...
Short Takes
Oct 26, 2011 — Piercing chamber drama though it may be, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers would seem an unlikely candidate for the theater, so quiet, vivid, and intimate is its story of a dying woman and the sisters who fail to offer her...
Features
Oct 6, 2011 — When I was living in Haight-Ashbury in the second half of the 1970s, you’d still see Robert Crumb drawing in some coffeehouse now and again. I don’t remember ever having a conversation with him, as I probably wouldn’t have wanted...