The Criterion Collection
Essays
Oct 30, 2014 — Tati’s witty visual comedy also functioned as satire of a rapidly modernizing postwar France.
Aug 26, 2014 — Define the Japanese New Wave however you like—there are innumerable possible launching points, and the name players in the fifties and sixties were old and young and in between—but from any juncture, Shohei Imamura was a primary figure and, at...
Aug 19, 2014 — Alfonso Cuaron, a filmmaker congenitally allergic to creative constriction, made his most liberated movie with this erotic, moving, often funny threesome tale.
Jun 20, 2013 — The prophetic voice of H. G. Wells resonates throughout this singularly ambitious, spectacularly designed vision.
Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.
Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.
Essays
Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...
Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....
Jun 28, 2011 — Raymond Queneau’s Zazie dans le métro is the funniest book ever written in, and about, the French language. When it came out in 1959, it “made the whole of France laugh,” Jean-Paul Rappeneau, who helped Louis Malle adapt it to...
Essays
May 10, 2011 — Something Wild asks the eternal question “What makes us happy?” But the answer it proposes is far from easily arrived at. It’s a boy meets girl story, certainly, but one that goes much deeper with that narrative than most films...