The Criterion Collection
Dec 5, 2012 — The following is excerpted from an interview that originally appeared in the February 1, 1981, issue of L’avant-scène: Cinéma. It was conducted by Olivier Eyquem and Jean-Claude Missiaen. Eyquem is a documentalist and former staff member at Positif; he blogs...
Nov 20, 2012 — Michael Cimino’s visionary western is a superbly realized account of a shocking real American tragedy.
Essays
Nov 14, 2012 — Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.
Short Takes
Nov 7, 2012 — In this clip from the recent documentary A Testimony as an Image, which reunites members of the Rashomon crew nearly sixty years after Akira Kurosawa’s epochal film was made, lighting and electrical technician Genkon Nakaoka describes the four hours of...
Essays
Nov 6, 2012 — When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, produce some of the greatest films ever made, and exert a tremendous and lasting influence on filmmaking...
Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.
Essays
Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...
Short Takes
Oct 15, 2012 — The feral first three films by Norman Mailer, available in our thirty-fifth Eclipse set, may look primitive, but Mailer had some of the best filmmakers in the business on set to help him out, including verité pioneers D. A. Pennebaker...
Features
Sep 27, 2012 — A culinary, cinematic, and musical institution is as endangered as the eels in the Thames.
Essays
Sep 25, 2012 — No mere jigsaw movie, David Fincher’s thriller is also a nuanced character study, a satire of corporate culture, and a film about filmmaking.