Breathless

Dec 9, 1985 — Movie thrillers may come and go, but after half a century, Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps still reigns supreme. And not only for the sheer, breathless excitement of the story; the seamless construction; the chilling, beautifully realized atmosphere; and the...

Jan 7, 1985 — King Kong is unique in motion picture history. In the 51 years since its original release, its particular combination of unbridled imagination and ingenious craftsmanship have never been equalled. Not only has it stood the test of time, but King...

Dec 3, 1984 — Since the dawn of the sound era, an estimated 25,000 feature-length films have been produced—and that’s in the English language alone. When, in the early 1960s, an international group of film critics were polled as to their “number-one film of...

Nov 14, 2016 — From the delicate natural lighting in Jacques Demy’s Lola to the breathtaking widescreen Technicolor in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le fou, the late cinematographer Raoul Coutard’s most indelible images remain hallmarks of modern French cinema. In his memory, we’ve gathered a...

Feb 10, 2016 — Regular Criterion Collection contributor :: kogonada explores the innovative cinematic lexicon Godard developed in the fifteen features he made between 1960 and 1967.

May 19, 2010 — Plenty of ink has been expended over the years on the turbulent friendship between Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, which helped define the French New Wave in the 1960s. Now those stories jump off the page and onto the screen...

Apr 21, 2009 — Fifty years ago today . . . Godard wrote this New Wave battle cry for the April 22, 1959, issue of the French journal Arts, on the news of François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows being selected to represent France at...

Dec 21, 2008 — André Bazin has a curious status in intellectual life. He is everywhere admitted as the founding father of film criticism and theory in general. The magazine he created in the 1950s, Cahiers du cinéma, has good claim to be the...

Feb 1, 2018 — G. W. Pabst’s breathlessly paced reimagining of a mine disaster makes an urgent plea for international cooperation in the post–World War I era.

Breathlessly kinetic, meticulously choreographed, and sometimes hauntingly meditative, this selection from the martial-arts film canon stretches across cultures and eras.