The Criterion Collection
May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.
Short Takes
Sep 29, 2014 — We were saddened to learn of the death of our dear friend Peter von Bagh. The seventy-one-year-old Finnish film director, historian, writer, and programmer (he cofounded the world-renowned Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä and was the artistic director of...
Short Takes
Jul 18, 2014 — The annual Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, has become the hottest showcase for the latest restorations of classic and overlooked films from around the world. So we were thrilled that they decided to show our restoration of Richard Lester’s...
Mar 24, 2014 — Rome is as exquisite as it is suffocating in Paolo Sorrentino’s profound tale of contemporary entropy.
Essays
Feb 28, 2014 — Other first films exude the sparkling joy of filmmaking that one feels in Breathless, but how many can boast its sure-handedness?
Dec 3, 2013 — This scathing drama about a toxic society established Elio Petri as an important director of popular political entertainment in Italy.
Apr 24, 2012 — An unverifiable, if heartfelt, assertion: For the quarter century between 1945 and 1970 (or from Rome Open City to Fellini Satyricon), the world’s greatest popular cinema was produced in Italy—a realm of glamorous superstars, sensational comedians, and great genre flicks....
Essays
Oct 4, 2011 — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s landmark film intermingles the sacred and profane, associating libertines with holy music, the avant-garde of the thirties, and neoclassical and biblical references.
This Belgian visionary took a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to film form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion.
Essays
Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...