The Criterion Collection
Sep 19, 2005 — When I was a teenage cinephile, in the mid-1970s, Masculin féminin was enormously significant to me. It represented France’s nouvelle vague of the sixties, with its youthful, anarchic spirit of freedom and spontaneity. It was in black and white and...
Jan 31, 2005 — Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel...
Sep 29, 2003 — “Gray literature” is the term German film historians use to describe the material written purely for publicity purposes and made available to the press, but not meant for official publication. Often this gray literature, which is only accessible to film...
Essays
Sep 23, 2002 — René Clair’s early sound film is an iconic vision of lower-class Paris bursting with charm and romance.
Jul 17, 1995 — Kurosawa made the acquaintance of Desu Uzala thirty years earlier, when he read Vladimir Arseniev’s account of charting the Russian-Manchurian border in the earlier part of this century. There, the Russian soldier and explorer had met Dersu, the Siberian hunter,...
Essays
Oct 12, 1987 — Akira Kurosawa’s thrilling Cinemascope epic is set squarely within the traditions of the Japanese film genre known as the “Chambara.”
Short Takes
Sep 27, 2017 — Filmmaker Allison Anders recalls a story about her time working with the late Harry Dean Stanton on the set of Paris, Texas.
The Daily
Sep 17, 2020 — Antonio Campos’s The Devil All the Time and Sean Durkin’s The Nest have A.V. Club writers revisiting the films they’ve made with Josh Mond.
In Theaters
Feb 8, 2018 — Next week, the International House Philadelphia will screen the 1930 Paul Robeson vehicle Borderline as part of its ongoing series exploring “race films.”