The Criterion Collection
Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...
Oct 23, 2006 — The New Zealand director’s debut feature is a bridge between her tentative, probing film school works and her subsequent female character studies.
Oct 23, 2006 — Throughout the sixties and seventies, the Italian director created a series of political dramas that were at once provocations, exposés, puzzles, and acts of virtuosity.
Essays
Oct 16, 2006 — Lodge Kerrigan’s grim, lucid dispatch from the murky depths of madness situates itself inside the tormented consciousness of a schizophrenic.
Essays
Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s dynamic, intricately madcap movie is a multitoned send-up of samurai film lore.
Essays
Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki’s drama sees sexuality as a potent anarchic force that, in its implacable selfishness, brushes aside any sort of order or discipline.
Essays
May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.
Essays
Aug 2, 2004 — Dismissed as minor Jean Renoir, the film deserves better, especially when seen in the larger context of numerous American and European films of the 1950s and their shared preoccupation with theater and performance.
May 9, 2004 — With his vibrant chronicle of an Oedipal revolt, Volker Schlöndorff captures the source novel’s singular recreation of the German past.
Essays
Oct 27, 2003 — Attuned to the ineffable weirdness and crushing mundanity of workplace paranoia, Steven Soderbergh’s film finds anger and sorrow in the way we brutalize our means of communication