In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Dec 21, 2008 — André Bazin has a curious status in intellectual life. He is everywhere admitted as the founding father of film criticism and theory in general. The magazine he created in the 1950s, Cahiers du cinéma, has good claim to be the...

Dec 15, 2008 — Flash back to September 1968. The Swedish Film Week in Sorrento, Italy, with its alfresco suppers and its excursions to Capri and Pompeii. Ingmar Bergman was expected, and he and Liv Ullmann were assigned a luxurious villa for the duration....

Dec 11, 2008 — Technical director Lee Kline, just back from Paris, where he worked on Last Year at Marienbad with Alain Resnais, reports: I was a little nervous to show Alain Resnais our new transfer of Marienbad, but I pushed hard to have...

Dec 9, 2008 — Dave Filipi is the Director of Film/Video at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. He has been a fan of the Criterion Collection since the days when laserdisc was king. (Ohio State 42, Michigan 7; photo by...

Dec 7, 2008 — Fitting as a monument to such a long, influential, multimedia career, the publisher Taschen has released the mammoth The Ingmar Bergman Archives, a 592-page, fifteen-pound chronicle of the Swedish filmmaker’s career in film, theater, and television (“Just don’t pick up...

Dec 2, 2008 — The Danish director explains movie magic and confesses his carnal sins in this impassioned artist statement written to accompany the films that make up his Europe Trilogy

Nov 27, 2008 — An enormous welter of insoluble problems is on display in Luis Buñuel’s classic—the ending solves nothing; the story just begins again.

Nov 23, 2008 — Wes Anderson made a film without a trace of cynicism, one that obviously grew out of his affection for his char­acters in particular and for people in general.

Nov 21, 2008 — This month we asked critic Robin Wood—whose books include Hitchcock’s Films and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan and who recently wrote essays for the Criterion releases The Furies and Le plaisir—to pick his ten favorite films in the collection. Newly...

Nov 21, 2008 — It's pretty hard to go wrong selecting ten “best” or ten “favorites” from the Criterion Collection, although it might be interesting to select the ten worst Criterion releases (something that, in deference to my friends at Criterion, I will not...