The Criterion Collection
May 14, 2017 — Yasujiro Ozu’s ode to childhood interweaves observations of human behavior with the simple surfaces of quotidian life in Tokyo.
Jul 22, 2015 — Stephen Frears brings a playful and shimmering cinematic quality to Hanif Kureishi’s multilayered script about a Pakistani immigrant community in Margaret Thatcher–era London.
Jul 7, 2015 — Our recollections of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 movie The Killers are apt to center on three primary elements: Ernest Hemingway’s story, so literally brought to the screen in the film’s opening scenes; Ava Gardner, carrying the full weight of that late-forties...
Essays
May 13, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.
May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.
Mar 27, 2012 — Noël Coward and David Lean created a patriotic diptych with their first two films: In Which We Serve, from 1942, about the bravery and sacrifice of British sailors and those who love them, and the 1944 This Happy Breed, on...
Essays
Mar 29, 2011 — As the only film of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera brought to the screen with the participation of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, Victor Schertzinger’s 1939 Technicolor The Mikado is a unique specimen; however one rates it, there is nothing with...
Sep 21, 2010 — Warrendale: Man of ActionAllan King was one of cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality, but the term documentary seems too puny to describe the intense, passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality. King’s early nonfiction features are...
Feb 10, 2010 — Revanche begins with a reflection of trees in a lake at twilight. They’re seen upside down—an image of nature reversed—yet the earth is eerily calm. This almost otherworldly illusion arouses a viewer’s awareness of perspective, which is then disturbed by...
Essays
Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s first feature is the kind of uncanny, equivocally realist movie you might hope to duck into in a strange city, stumbling across it in a low-rent theater while escaping a bad date or a debt collector.