The Criterion Collection
Jun 5, 2006 — Painful, beautiful, and discomfiting, Maurice Pialat’s coming-of-age drama remains as startling in its honesty, its unique mix of savagery and delicacy, as it was in 1983.
Essays
May 22, 2006 — Luis Buñuel’s merciless satire concerns the smallness of our vision of progress and our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning.
Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s coming-of-age drama offers an unusually full and individualized characterization of a boy whose yearnings, sensitivities, and fantasies outstrip his personality.
Jan 11, 2006 — The typical midlife crisis, to which we all fall victim in some major or minor degree, came to Fellini with a slight delay. On the twentieth of January, 1960, the day of his fortieth birthday, he was, in fact, too...
Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.
Apr 25, 2005 — Pietro Germi offers locomotive relief in this comedy about the horrors of inertia.
Essays
Feb 14, 2005 — A touchstone of Jean-Luc Godard‘s political period, the film plays with the idea of recording working-class history as it is happening.
Jan 31, 2005 — Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel...
Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s genius is to focus resolutely on what comes before or after or falls in between the decisive actions: it’s a crime film where we learn how gangsters brush their teeth.
Essays
Nov 15, 2004 — Short Cuts is an L.A. jazz rhapsody that represents Robert Altman at an all-time personal peak—and it came at just the right time in his career.