The Criterion Collection
Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki made a breakthrough with his second feature, a yakuza thriller full of devil-may-care assurance and try-anything imagination.
Essays
Jul 19, 2004 — In Yasujiro Ozu’s hands, the extended-family drama widened its focus to encompass friends, neighbors, and employers.
Sep 29, 2003 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his final energies to bringing the lost, gray years of postwar Germany back to life.
Essays
Aug 4, 2003 — Shohei Imamura’s lurid black comedy showcases the director’s passion for everything that’s kinky, lowlife, or irrational in Japanese culture.
Essays
Aug 28, 2000 — Good Morning is the wildcard in Yasujiro Ozu’s career, the film that looks least like all his others, and one of the few where he sees the world through childrens’ eyes rather than those of an old man.For many years,...
Essays
Nov 22, 1999 — Breathtaking, fastmoving, and overflowing with a delightfully self-mocking sense of humor, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is one of the most popular and influential Japanese films ever made. Released in 1954, this rip-snorting action-adventure epic about a sixteenth-century farm community led...
Essays
Feb 22, 1999 — To experience a film by Japanese B-movie visionary Seijun Suzuki is to experience Japanese cinema in all its frenzied, voluptuous excess. Born in Tokyo in 1923, Seijun Suzuki is best known for a cycle of extraordinary yakuza (gangster) movies he...
Essays
Aug 24, 1989 — Yasujiro Ozu’s favorite theme of the stresses and strains of parent-child relationships figure prominently in this story of a raggle-taggle theater troupe giving its final performances in a small fishing village.
Jun 22, 2026 — Deep Dives In 1971, upon the release of his first and only feature film, James Bidgood pulled a disappearing act. He had spent the better part of seven years shooting Pink Narcissus, a hallucinatory tale of a daydreaming gay hustler, on...
The Daily
Feb 13, 2026 — This week brings a tribute to Diane Keaton, notes on Taxi Driver at fifty, and three flights of the spirit.