Mod

Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.

Nov 16, 2008 — Chungking Express (1994) was the Masculin féminin of the 1990s, a pop-art movie about cool twentysomethings looking for love in the city that has replaced Paris as the center of the world-cinema imagination. What Jean-Luc Godard did for “the children...

Nov 11, 2008 — Groundbreaking modernist artist Paul Strand (1890–1976) might have been better known for his photography than his filmmaking, but the two films he directed are both extraordinary testaments to his brilliance. The first, his silent 1921 avant-garde masterpiece Manhatta, a luminous...

This patient observer of everyday life in Japan has been enormously influential among filmmakers seeking a cinema of economy and poetry.

Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.

Oct 16, 2008 — Michael Boland’s design for Criterion’s special edition release of Vampyr has gotten some special attention of its own, from the prestigious design journal Communications Arts. In the Exhibit section—highlighting “outstanding examples of graphic design and advertising”—of the journal’s website, editors...

Oct 6, 2008 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career.

This explosion of vibrant, innovative, and highly self-conscious films from France in the late 1950s and early 1960s changed the game.

Arguably the most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa had a career that spanned from the Second World War to the early nineties and that stands as a monument of artistic and personal achievement.

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.