The Criterion Collection
Sep 15, 2009 — Words are the trained fleas in David Mamet’s sidewalk circus—dirty words, often bloodstained, usually swarming, that perform their acrobatic stunts for gawkers who will likely get their pockets picked. That’s the reputation, anyhow. More than thirty years after he made...
Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....
Jul 1, 2009 — Almost thirty years have gone by since Wallace Shawn and André Gregory sat down for dinner on the Upper West Side and talked (and talked) their way into film history. So for our new special edition DVD of that encounter,...
Jun 22, 2009 — So much critical ink has been shed over Last Year at Marienbad that one might wonder if the flood of commentary, once receded, would take the film along with it. Alain Resnais’ second feature has been lavishly praised and royally...
May 5, 2009 — French filmmaker Julien Duvivier is undoubtedly best known for the 1937 classic Pépé le Moko, starring Jean Gabin. But many film lovers today have seen little else by this poetic realist pioneer, a victim, Michael Atkinson writes in an insightful...
Essays
Apr 21, 2009 — “Just takes a few months to get to be a hundred. If you’re in the right place at the right time.” I first saw Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece The Wages of Fear when the restored version was released in the U.S.,...
Mar 16, 2009 — This long-underappreciated giant of Japanese cinema was an innovative visual stylist and a born storyteller who preferred to make films about outsiders.
Production Notes
Feb 24, 2009 — On January 12, French cinema lost one of its truest enablers. Claude Berri was as well-known for his support of cinema, both financial and critical, as he was for his own filmmaking. The actor turned director-writer-producer made twenty-three films (the...
Dec 4, 2008 — With Ron Howard’s big-screen adaptation of Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon opening today, the editors at New York magazine remind us that Frank Langella is hardly the first actor to get all jowly for the camera. They’ve put together a list...
A singular, iconoclastic artist and philosopher, Bresson illuminates the history of cinema with a spiritual yet socially incisive body of work.