The Criterion Collection
Jul 23, 2015 — The composer is credited with scoring eleven films for Bergman—among them Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Magician (1958)—the last being The Virgin Spring (1960), with its evocative use of medieval instruments.
Jun 17, 2015 — Taking the form of a casual conversation, Louis Malle’s film about transformative experiences is an outgrowth of its writer-stars’ experimental theater days.
Jun 17, 2015 — From a shrewd adaptation by André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, Jonathan Demme fashions a visually inventive dreamscape out of an Ibsen classic.
Jun 1, 2015 — A legionnaire turned fruit seller misses out on Germany’s economic miracle in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s breakthrough melodrama.
May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.
Mar 11, 2015 — More than thirty years after his death in 1977, Roberto Rossellini is remembered by your average film buff as the father of Italian neorealism (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948) and of actress and model Isabella...
Jun 24, 2014 — In 1964, Richard Lester harnessed the Beatles’ exploding superstardom for a giddy day-in-the-life pop masterpiece.
Jun 9, 2014 — Your vigilance as an artist is an amorous vigilance, a vigilance of desire.—Roland Barthes to Michelangelo Antonioni, 1979 It’s lamentable that Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the most fashionable vanguard European filmmakers during the sixties, has mainly been out of fashion...
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?