The Criterion Collection
May 25, 2010 — Between 1952 and 2003, depending on how the various serial works are counted, Stan Brakhage made somewhere between 350 and 400 films, about half of them short film poems under ten minutes in length, most of the rest between ten...
Mar 16, 2010 — More than a decade after his death in 1997, the moment is right for the rediscovery of the work of Marco Ferreri. “I think he’s modern. More than modern, in fact,” frequent collaborator Marcello Mastroianni once remarked, encapsulating how far...
Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...
Essays
Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.
Sep 13, 2007 — Some people have seen an impossible number of movies, and the most astonishing part is that they actually remember them all. Pierre Rissient, who is very much on our minds these days, is one of those. Producer, director, distributor, talent...
Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.
Jan 15, 2007 — Allison Anders, Dean Lent and Kurt Voss’s influential indie paints a compelling picture of the Los Angeles punk-rock scene of the 1980s: what it was like on the inside—and what it was like inside the musicians’ heads.
Oct 16, 2006 — Alfonso Cuarón’s first film—a sex farce that pokes fun at Mexican culture, including a public-service AIDS campaign—emerged from Mexico’s beleaguered state funding system for cinema, and was initially shelved by the government.
Essays
Jan 31, 2005 — With this early work, Bernardo Bertolucci confidently demonstrated the instinctive lyricism and sensuality that in his maturity would become his very own signature.