The Criterion Collection
Essays
Oct 26, 2010 — A coming-of-age story about a clique of teenage schoolgirls who will never grow old and a demon spirit in the guise of a spinster who was never young, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s eye-poppingly demented, jaw-droppingly inventive House is 1970s Japanese pop culture...
Oct 19, 2010 — With Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa set out to debunk some of the more inflated myths that had attached themselves to the samurai.
Jan 19, 2010 — A Belgian in New York It was in the 1970s, the first decade of her career, that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created the works that would define her. Informed as much by her brushes with the experimental film scene in...
May 20, 2009 — Iconoclasts are meant to kill their idols, and so it’s fitting that Shohei Imamura launched into his career as if on a patricidal rampage. Like Nagisa Oshima, the other towering figure of the Japanese New Wave, Imamura (1926–2006) rejected the...
This patient observer of everyday life in Japan has been enormously influential among filmmakers seeking a cinema of economy and poetry.
Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s late work is a masterful amalgam of high international modernism and traditional Japanese fine arts.
Oct 23, 2006 — The New Zealand director’s debut feature is a bridge between her tentative, probing film school works and her subsequent female character studies.
Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s crime film contains plenty of the requisite genre elements—double-crossings, violence, kidnappings, and gun battles—but it’s also a pensive meditation on age, friendship, and lost opportunities.
Essays
Feb 23, 2004 — With his drama about a Sicilian bandit, Francesco Rosi developed the style and method that would make him, during the sixties and seventies, the greatest political filmmaker of his time.
Essays
Jul 17, 2000 — Designed to steam viewers’ glasses, Roger Vadim’s directorial debut boldly announced the arrival of Brigitte Bardot.