Le Plaisir

Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...

Dec 21, 2009 — It is with great sadness that we note the passing of Robin Wood, a true lion of film criticism and a dear friend. How does one begin to describe the impact this writer and thinker had on his field? For...

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s ingenious tale of Viennese cafe society conveys both the transience of individual passions and the durability of passion itself as a motivating force in human behavior.

Nov 10, 1986 — Max Ophuls’s masterpiece is a transformation of a conventional subject into an avant-garde adventure, and a spectacular stylistic breakthrough in the utilization of wide screen and color.

Nov 21, 2008 — This month we asked critic Robin Wood—whose books include Hitchcock’s Films and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and who recently wrote essays for the Criterion releases The Furies and Le plaisir—to pick his ten favorite films in the collection. Newly...

Mar 9, 2021 — “Oral tradition is a tradition of images. What is said is stronger than what is written; the word addresses itself to the imagination, not the ear. Imagination creates the image and the image creates cinema, so we are in direct...

May 3, 2018 — Depth, beauty, curiosity—what gave luminous French star Danielle Darrieux staying power across eight decades? Critic Farran Smith Nehme looks for the answer in two films from opposite ends of her career.

Sep 19, 2011 — Jean-Luc Godard, lover of paradox, once characterized Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins (1959) as “a deeply hollow and therefore profound film,” a pronouncement, like so many of the pithy mots Godard used to reel off in the pages of Cahiers du...

Oct 4, 2023 — In his forty-seventh film, Wiseman explores all that goes into running one of the world’s greatest restaurants.