The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.
Mar 10, 2003 — The Swedish director of I Am Curious explains how he fused the themes of eroticism, self-exploration, voyeurism, and nonviolence into a film about the new freedoms of the young. QUESTION: I Am Curious seemed to be a cinematic Tristram Shandy,...
Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...
Aug 20, 2001 — Before Lars von Trier, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson there was Carl Th. Dreyer. The first great film artist to pursue the ineffable in cinema, Dreyer gave depth to what early silent filmmakers innately understood yet took...
Essays
Jan 29, 2001 — In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s drama, the characters abandon their twin faiths, in God and the British Empire, and turn themselves over to more ancient and dangerous powers.
The actor and director praises Black God, White Devil as one of the most important Brazilian films ever made, talks about the complex humanity of Il Posto, and reflects on why Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are his favorite filmmakers.
Jul 11, 2025 — Jon Raymond is an author and screenwriter living in Portland. His books include The Half-Life, Livability, Rain Dragon, Freebird, Denial, and God and Sex. He has also published a collection of art writing called The Community: Writings About Art in...
Jon Raymond is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. His novels include Freebird, Denial, and God and Sex, and his screenwriting credits include Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, and First Cow, among others.
Mexican author Juan Villoro has been a visiting professor at Yale, Princeton, and Stanford universities. His books in English are the short-story collection The Guilty, the novel The Reef, the young-adult novel The Wild Book, and God Is Round, a...
Essays
Feb 12, 2019 — In a stark, forbidding prison, a nun ascends a staircase, framed by vertical bars, and walks down a corridor, unlocking cell doors. Women start coming out; two of them quarrel. Smoking on her bunk, one inmate sighs when told she...