The Criterion Collection
Oct 23, 2010 — In 1945, a teenage Stanley Kubrick was given a job as staff photographer at Look magazine, where he published more than nine hundred striking images, most of them in the realist style of New York School street photography. By the...
Oct 12, 2010 — One Every movie is two stories: the one it tells and the one that remains to be told about it by those involved in its creation. These two narratives converge in a certain current of the cinema of the past...
Sep 26, 2010 — The Thin Red Line, arguably the greatest war film ever made, ended two decades of silence from Terrence Malick, cinema’s wandering auteur. The silence wasn’t entirely self-imposed, since during this time he tried to launch a few productions—including a tale...
Aug 24, 2010 — T he Docks of New York is one of those orphaned silents, released in 1928, the very end of the era. Apparently, it was previewed the same week as Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool, his first “all-talking” picture, the follow-up...
Aug 24, 2010 — Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) was first and foremost a star vehicle for Emil Jannings, the internationally known, Swiss-born actor, who had left Germany in October 1926 to work for Paramount Pictures. During his two and a half...
Jul 27, 2010 — Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as...
Apr 28, 2010 — Just over halfway through Ang Lee’s masterful Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, the small group of men at the story’s center, young, Southern-sympathizing Bushwhackers fighting in divided Missouri, meet up with other ragtag bands of rebels. Coalescing under...
Short Takes
Dec 6, 2009 — Jim Ellis’s insightful new book, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (University of Minnesota Press), builds from the premise that “Jarman is the mostimportant Anglo-American gay director in the post-Stonewall era, although it is surprising that, to my knowledge, no one has ever...
Dec 1, 2009 — The deeply disturbing drama of this landmark documentary about the Rolling Stones sprang from the disturbing drama of the times.
Jul 21, 2009 — Jean-Luc Godard’s essay follows twenty-four hours in Juliette’s life, beginning and ending in the evening in the apartment she shares with her husband and two young children.