The Criterion Collection
Jun 19, 2006 — This essay originally appeared in the fanzine PHOTON (issue #22), in 1972. Stop-motion animation has been attracting a growing number of enthusiasts for about the last ten years, and though it seems the majority of these people must out of...
May 22, 2006 — Barbara Kopple’s detailed analysis of a Kentucky mine workers’ strike is a virtual hub of urgent themes, formal tendencies, political debates, and material practices that define post-sixties documentary in America.
Apr 24, 2006 — M ade in 1965 and still considered by many to be Marco Bellocchio’s masterpiece, Fists in the Pocket foreshadows the years of student protest in a family tragedy bordering on horror. This seminal first feature catapulted the twenty-six-year-old Bellocchio to...
Apr 17, 2006 — Another movie, another cause célèbre: this mysterious film by Orson Welles has been dismissed as a disaster and hailed as a masterpiece.
Feb 21, 2006 — Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) is an Ealing comedy in name only. True, it’s undeniably a comedy and was made by (though largely not at) Ealing. But in virtually every other respect, it deviates startlingly from the commonly accepted stereotype....
Jan 5, 2006 — A gray flannel ghost story in which the living haunt the dead, the least appreciated of Akira Kurosawa’s midperiod collaborations with Toshiro Mifune throws open the windows of Japanese corporate corruption.
Jan 5, 2006 — Akira Kurosawa appreciated Shakespeare’s knack for linking the private and the political, threading a tale of corruption and revenge through a tangle of blood ties.
Nov 21, 2005 — Why would ambitious filmmakers simply film an opera? Many admirers of the work of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger have assumed that their decision to make The Tales of Hoffmann, in 1950, was in some way an admission by the...
Oct 24, 2005 — When Samurai Rebellion premiered, on May 27, 1967, the original Japanese title was Joiuchi—hairyo tsuma shimatsu, which means something like Rebellion—Receive the Wife. This title indicates the two concerns of the film: the social impact of an unheard-of act of...
Oct 24, 2005 — Hideo Gosha’s swordplay drama captures rebellion against the Japanese feudal system, pitting its twin protagonists against each other but also, together, against the very notion of authority itself.