The Criterion Collection
Feb 21, 2007 — It was bound to happen. After a good start for the blog, a quiet stretch. The year has gotten off to a busy start. Every minute there seems to be a meeting with a new player about a new technology...
Jan 1, 2007 — I’ve started writing this several times, and each time I’ve gotten diverted. Originally, I wrote about our troops in Iraq and the fact that we had sent along DVDs for the holidays, but I had a hard time equating our...
Mar 10, 2003 — The Swedish director of I Am Curious explains how he fused the themes of eroticism, self-exploration, voyeurism, and nonviolence into a film about the new freedoms of the young. QUESTION: I Am Curious seemed to be a cinematic Tristram Shandy,...
Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...
Essays
Dec 31, 1999 — As a tour de force of screen acting, Autumn Sonata stands unchallenged as the finest work of Ingmar Bergman’s last few years as a movie director. Fanny and Alexander may have won the Oscars, but Autumn Sonata represents Bergman’s chamber...
The actor talks about the experience of sharing The Princess Bride with his son, celebrates the transportive quality of Do the Right Thing, and selects formative favorites like Withnail and I and Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
The actor praises Amy Heckerling’s gift for capturing the experience of youth on-screen, celebrates the rich legacy of musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, and calls Richard Linklater “the great American director.”
The actor and authorexplains why everyone should be required to experience the work of Laurie Anderson, praises the way Kes portrays the relationship between man and nature, and talks about how A Room with a View turned him into a...
The host of the hit interview show Chicken Shop Date talks about Portrait of a Lady on Fire and being drawn to films with undeniable chemistry, praises 12 Angry Men as one of the greatest films of all time, and...
The Daily
May 29, 2026 — We’re revisiting work by Tarkovsky, Pelechian, and Portabella as well as two films with the word Dead in the title.