Persona

Dec 16, 2008 — More than a year ago, Peter and I were in the midst of discussions about how we wanted to launch the Criterion cinematheque. Over time, those discussions expanded to include every department at Criterion. We wanted to have a single...

Dec 10, 2008 — Renowned author, film scholar, and Wong Kar-wai well-wisher David Bordwell takes a peek at the new Criterion edition of Chungking Express on his personal blog. Bordwell, who’s written about the artistry of this dynamic auteur in his books Planet Hong...

Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.

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 2, 2008 — Geoffrey Macnab posts a touching personal tribute to British writer-producer-director Sidney Gilliat, “one of the unsung heroes of British cinema, an extraordinarily versatile figure who wrote and directed rip-roaring thrillers, satirical comedies, and home-front social dramas,” in the Guardian, marking...

Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...

Oct 21, 2008 — TECHNICOLOR, ROME—What a day! After spending the morning with Antonio Salvatori, the original color timer on Rosi’s The Moment of Truth and Antonioni’s Identification of a Woman, we were lucky enough to run into the great master Giuseppe Rotunno, who...

Oct 20, 2008 — Costa-Gavras’s film pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role.

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.

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.