The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 5, 2017 — Kirsten Johnson interrogates the thorny ethics of nonfiction filmmaking in her intriguingly elliptical blend of essay, travelogue, and memoir.
Essays
Nov 22, 2016 — The result of a notoriously troubled production, Marlon Brando’s unorthodox western presents a brooding vision of human futility.
Oct 19, 2016 — Martha Karsh, editor of The Beatles A Hard Day’s Night: A Private Archive, published in September by Phaidon, talks about her family’s Beatlemania and assembling a book about the world’s most famous rock band.
Features
Sep 19, 2016 — If you consider noir as a global phenomenon, then films like Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (1938), and Carné’s Port of Shadows (1938) may be the first full harvest of this bitter crop.
Features
Jun 29, 2016 — In this essay, first published in Grand Street in 1994, Dr. Strangelove coscreenwriter Terry Southern offers a lively behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production.
Jun 17, 2016 — The late 1920s and early 1930s were wonderfully productive years for Jean Renoir and Michel Simon, a simpatico director-actor duo who produced four films together: Tire au flanc (which gave Simon his first starring role), On purge bébé, La chienne,...
Jun 1, 2016 — With Wrong Move, Wim Wenders made “a movie about the impossibility of moviemaking, a road movie about the uselessness of travel, a literary film about the impossibility of communication.”
Features
Mar 3, 2016 — By the time Charlie Chaplin began work on what would be his first feature-length film, in 1919, he had been sneaking up to the longer format for some time.
Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.
Tech Corner
Jan 7, 2016 — While in Tokyo to work on Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film, our technical director got a glimpse at some of the filmmaker’s original drawings that he used to shoot the movie.