The Criterion Collection
The Daily
May 4, 2022 — The twenty-fifth edition offers lavish decadence, experimental poetry, and timely poignance.
Essays
May 3, 2011 — Ingmar Bergman’s exquisite carnal comedy turns a set of boudoir farce conventions into lyrical poetry.
Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...
Jul 9, 2007 — This unforgettable drama about damaged adolescents combines Jean Cocteau’s penchant for mythic poetry and Jean-Pierre Melville's knack for crafting intricate schemes.
Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.
Jun 21, 2004 — Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaust the adjective-prone, as man and artist, his person and his...
Essays
Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...
Feb 10, 2003 — The poet Paul Eluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car. Ordinarily, I would settle for that. However, with so much being written about the film...
The actor praises the unique sensibility that Martin Scorsese brought to The Last Temptation of Christ, shares his love for the visual poetry of his friend and collaborator Guillermo del Toro, and talks about why Throne of Blood is his...
The writer and director pays tribute to the late Béla Tarr, shares his love for the way Andrei Tarkovsky merged poetry and cinema, and suggests watching a double bill of Black Girl and I Knew Her Well.