The Criterion Collection
Sneak Peeks
May 7, 2013 — Band of Outsiders, now available in a Criterion Blu-ray edition, was Anna Karina’s fourth appearance in a film by her husband at the time, Jean-Luc Godard. The film contains what may be Karina’s sprightliest performance, the perfection of her attunement...
May 7, 2013 — Blame it on the Madison. Or blame it on Arthur, Franz, and Odile’s gleeful race through the Louvre in an attempt to break the world record (held by an American, of course) for the quickest visit ever. Blame it on...
Short Takes
May 6, 2013 — The films of Max Ophuls, whose birthday we celebrate today, are luxuriously cinematic. His camera glides and tracks and cranes; we viewers swoon. But, as Molly Haskell has written, “the roving camera and the visual glissandos are never virtuoso flourishes...
Sneak Peeks
Apr 26, 2013 — Among filmmaker Pierre Etaix’s many eclectic accomplishments is his appearance as one of the thieves in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. However, you probably won’t be able to spot him: all that’s left of his performance is one of his hands, surreptitiously filching a wallet. In...
Sneak Peeks
Apr 25, 2013 — Repo Man comes on like a bat out of hell. The opening credits are driven by the instrumental version of Iggy Pop’s propulsive "Repo Man Theme,” a song that immediately establishes the film’s punk identity. It’s hard to imagine the...
Essays
Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...
Apr 22, 2013 — A vivid portrait of a ruthless murderer, Laurence Olivier’s Technicolor Shakespeare adaptation is back in a killer restoration.
Apr 10, 2013 — Teinosuke Kinugasa’s landmark color film is a visual feast that has finally been vibrantly restored.
Essays
Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...
Apr 9, 2013 — David Cronenberg and William S. Burroughs: it was a meeting of the mutant minds years in the making.