The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki’s drama sees sexuality as a potent anarchic force that, in its implacable selfishness, brushes aside any sort of order or discipline.
Essays
Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...
Essays
May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.
Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...
Essays
Apr 29, 2002 — Though set in wartime Soviet Union, Grigori Chukhrai’s drama walks away from the genre of war film, creating a portrait of life and problems behind the lines of battle.
Feb 14, 2002 — Robert Bresson’s second feature is fixed in history as one of the movies that heralded an austere, modernistic way of seeing and feeling.
Apr 23, 2001 — A majestic synthesis of disparate forms, Sergei Eisenstein’s final film seems to be as much a ballet or a moving painting as it is a movie.
Essays
Apr 23, 2001 — In 1955, Jules Dassin, an American director in exile in Paris, made this flat-out perfect piece of cinema. The film came as a redemption for Dassin: a one-time promising young director cranking out B-movies under an MGM contract ("They were...
Essays
Feb 19, 2001 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s romance film spins a web of myth and evocative symbolism around its central search for self-discovery.