The Criterion Collection
Essays
Oct 4, 2011 — No film better illustrates Pier Paolo Pasolini’s challenge to conventional representations, to the social and cultural consensus, than his 1976 masterwork.
Essays
Aug 16, 2011 — “It is my best film. I always loved it. I always believed in it. It is real cinema, done for cinema—like art for art.” That was Roman Polanski’s view of Cul-de-sac in 1970, four years after its release and just...
Short Takes
Jul 28, 2011 — We’re pleased to announce that Janus Films has picked up the North American rights to Aki Kaurismäki’s Le Havre, which, as you may have heard, premiered to much acclaim in May at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI (the...
Jun 20, 2011 — Genres collide in the great Hollywood movies of the midfifties cold-war thaw. With the truce in Korea and the red scare on the wane, ambitious directors seemed freer to mix and match and even ponder the new situation. The western...
Jun 6, 2011 — One Scene I lived in Zurich before joining Stanley Kubrick on his Napoleon project in 1969. Unfortunately, this film was never made, but I stayed with Stanley for another thirty years. It was in Zurich, in an art-house cinema, that...
Essays
Feb 1, 2011 — This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the 2006 DVD release of The Double Life of Véronique.At the opening ceremony of the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, actress Irène Jacob was asked to pay tribute to Krzysztof Kieślowski, who...
Nov 25, 2010 — Five Easy Pieces is not a statement about America but a closely observed report. Or, perhaps, a confession.
Aug 3, 2010 — Sanshiro Sugata: A Career Blooms Moviegoers the world over know Akira Kurosawa for Rashomon (1950) and the international classics that followed—Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, High and Low. The filmmaker’s dazzling technique made his genre tales about samurai...
Jul 26, 2010 — The Story of a Cheat: Breaking the Rules While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific...
Feb 23, 2010 — Like many other French cinephiles, I discovered Make Way for Tomorrow relatively late, although we had been interested in Leo McCarey for years. We had hunted down his Laurel and Hardy pictures, adored Duck Soup, the best of the Marx...