The Criterion Collection
Essays
Sep 18, 2006 — Nobuo Nakagawa’s legendary, genre-busting Japanese masterpiece explores the infernal desires that tempt us during our mortal existence—and the afterlife agonies awaiting those who succumb.
Sep 18, 2006 — Released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco’s forty-year dictatorship, The Spirit of the Beehive soon established itself as the consummate masterpiece of Spanish cinema. Yet, strangely, many of the gifted artists who collaborated on Víctor Erice’s first...
Feb 13, 2006 — Jean Renoir’s classic film shows the natural world and the power of technology as wedded through the closely coordinated labor—effected through glances and sign language—of two men.
Jan 11, 2006 — The typical midlife crisis, to which we all fall victim in some major or minor degree, came to Fellini with a slight delay. On the twentieth of January, 1960, the day of his fortieth birthday, he was, in fact, too...
Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.
May 9, 2004 — With his vibrant chronicle of an Oedipal revolt, Volker Schlöndorff captures the source novel’s singular recreation of the German past.
Dec 30, 2003 — Akira Kurosawa was a man of his time, who participated fully in the artistic and intellectual world of Japan from the 1930s until his death in 1998. Although filmgoers may think of him in terms of the screen images he...
Sep 23, 2002 — The theatricality of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller makes the point that psychoanalysis is a sister to cinema rather than a rival.
Essays
Sep 17, 2001 — George Sluizer’s nightmarish film is a study in everyday madness, rooted in the specifics of the Dutch and French landscapes and character.