Filmmaker

Apr 13, 2010 — Indefatigably political Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, best known for 1966’s truly revolutionary The Battle of Algiers, once stated that “the ideal director should be three-quarters Rossellini and one-quarter Eisenstein.” Certainly, one can see traces of the work of both of...

Mar 17, 2010 — Congratulations to yesterday’s winner, Caroline! Caroline’s pick for a work of Western literature she wishes Kurosawa had adapted was Oedipus Rex: I would love to have seen Kurosawa do Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. Honestly, I think that he is the only...

Mar 8, 2010 — Congratulations to Friday’s winner, Dan! Dan’s caption for this screenshot from Throne of Blood was: The Emperor initially resisted the switch from plastic bags to cloth. March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker...

Mar 5, 2010 — Congratulations to yesterday’s winners, Joe and Michael! Joe’s Hollywood-style tagline for Ikiru was: This summer: Death is only the beginning. And Michael’s, for Rashomon, was: He said. She said. He said. He said. March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion....

Feb 5, 2010 — Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (Knopf) begins with an epigram that pretty well sums up Altman’s attitude toward “truth” and “realism” in cinema and life. “I don’t think anybody remembers the truth, the facts,” the great filmmaker said. “You remember...

Jan 25, 2010 — Unlike the more aesthetically and intellectually conceived French New Wave, Italian neorealism was above all an ethical initiative—a way of saying that people were important, occasioned by a war that made many of them voiceless, faceless, and nameless victims. But...

Jan 19, 2010 — A Belgian in New York It was in the 1970s, the first decade of her career, that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created the works that would define her. Informed as much by her brushes with the experimental film scene in...

Dec 21, 2009 — Me and Orson Welles is the latest film from director Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused). Set in late-1930s New York, it’s both a nuanced, entertaining look at Orson Welles’s early career as founder of the Mercury Theater and a...

Nov 3, 2009 — If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece.

Oct 29, 2009 — In the spirit of the season, we asked a select coven of horror mavens (including a couple of our own) to write about their favorite Criterion scarefests. Chuck StephensEquinox: The Eyebrows of Mr. Asmodeus There are myriad ways into Equinox,...