The Criterion Collection
Mar 26, 2012 — A Night to Remember, the 1958 British film adaptation of Walter Lord’s 1955 book about the brief life and agonizing death of the Titanic, has proven unsinkable. With its Olympian yet unfailingly life-size view of the disaster that scuttled illusions...
Short Takes
Jan 5, 2011 — The blog Dangerous Minds has just posted a short entry focusing on the early-seventies almost-collaboration between Ron and Russell Mael, of the Los Angeles pop-rock band Sparks, and Jacques Tati, revealing what might have been a fascinating final chapter to...
Features
Sep 23, 2010 — I work closely on the Eclipse series, and one of the great privileges of that task is the chance to delve into the films and careers of artists I was previously only passingly acquainted with. Allan King is a supreme...
Jan 27, 2010 — This piece first appeared in the 1991 Wim Wenders collection The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversation (Faber and Faber), translated by Michael Hofmann. The story’s about a man who turns up somewhere in the desert out of nowhere and returns...
Jan 25, 2010 — Unlike the more aesthetically and intellectually conceived French New Wave, Italian neorealism was above all an ethical initiative—a way of saying that people were important, occasioned by a war that made many of them voiceless, faceless, and nameless victims. But...
Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.
Essays
Dec 6, 2004 — It’s hard to believe that M was made in 1931. If we allow for the fact that it’s in black and white, it is more engaging to the eye, more incisive in its irony, more firm in its grasp of...
Essays
Jul 14, 1998 — Adirector who knows his genres, Jonathan Demme has never been able to resist turning them inside out. Starting in the film industry as a publicist, Demme was soon hired by Roger Corman as a scriptwriter and then as a director....
Essays
Apr 23, 1990 — Paying little attention to civilized rules of cinema, and with a bit more than one million dollars, Steven Soderbergh expresses all his hidden anxieties in this indie classic.