The Criterion Collection
Apr 26, 2010 — In the late 1940s, driven by the opening-night ovations for A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams embarked on more than a decade of immense success. During this period, he wrote at a furious pace: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo,...
Essays
Jan 16, 2007 — The marvel of Mouchette inheres in the elegance, obstinacy, and capaciousness of Bresson’s double-mindedness.
Jun 5, 2006 — Painful, beautiful, and discomfiting, Maurice Pialat’s coming-of-age drama remains as startling in its honesty, its unique mix of savagery and delicacy, as it was in 1983.
Oct 24, 2005 — The hero in Masahiro Shinoda’s popular samurai movie is both a genre figure and an ordinary character, both killer and savior, both larger than life and lost in the mists.
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
Aug 2, 2004 — This kinetic and ineffably voluptuous musical is the happiest and most exuberant ripple in Jean Renoir’s career as a river of personal expression.
Jun 9, 2003 — In Stan Brakhage’s films we enter into momentary perceptual transactions in which we trade unhindered assimilation of images for intensified contact with pictorial or sensory features that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Essays
Aug 20, 2001 — Carl Dreyer considers the work of art’s soul in this excerpt from Dreyer in Double Reflection.
Essays
Jan 29, 2001 — Masahiro Shinoda’s historical drama uses traditional elements of Japanese theater to explore the tension between ethics and eroticism.
Essays
Nov 15, 1999 — Michael Powell’s controversial late film makes the cinema spectator’s own voyeurism shockingly obvious.