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Oct 23, 2014 — “I have been collecting Criterion Collection DVDs almost as long as I have owned a DVD player,” writes Alex Ross Perry, the director of Impolex (2009), The Color Wheel (2011), and Listen Up Philip (2014). “These are not my top...

The dynamic, Tokyo-born star was convincing whether playing a mercenary lone wolf or a heartsick love interest, a hero or a villain, in a sleek suit or samurai robes, and just as comfortable blending in to an ensemble as commanding...

Nov 4, 2010 — Angus MacLachlan is a playwright and screenwriter from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His screen credits include Junebug (2005), directed by Phil Morrison and starring Amy Adams, Embeth Davidtz, and Alessandro Nivola, and Stone (2010), starring Robert De Niro. In selecting his...

This Japanese visionary played chaos like jazz in his movies, which included anything-goes yakuza thrillers and daring postwar dramas of human frailty.

Jan 13, 2010 — Joe Mantegna played the lead roles in David Mamet’s House of Games and Homicide. Mantegna and Mamet started out together as actors in Chicago theater in the 1970s, before Mamet turned playwright. Mantegna went on to win a Tony Award...

Dec 11, 2009 — This expansive tribute to the iconic Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai was first published on the Criterion Collection’s website in fall 2005, around the time of the Criterion releases of two films starring Nakadai: Kurosawa’s Ran and the less well-known samurai...

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,”...

Apr 9, 2009 — The first time I “met” Max was in May of 1959, when Bergman’s stunning production of Urfaust came to London for just one week in the World Theatre Season. Groupie of all things Swedish that I was, I waited outside...

Dec 15, 2008 — Flash back to September 1968. The Swedish Film Week in Sorrento, Italy, with its alfresco suppers and its excursions to Capri and Pompeii. Ingmar Bergman was expected, and he and Liv Ullmann were assigned a luxurious villa for the duration....

Jan 21, 2008 — Lindsay Anderson’s adaptation of David Storey’s novel is a clenched fist of a movie that follows a professional Rugby League player who instinctively channels feeling through physical aggression.