You Are the Film

Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...

May 20, 2009 — Iconoclasts are meant to kill their idols, and so it’s fitting that Shohei Imamura launched into his career as if on a patricidal rampage. Like Nagisa Oshima, the other towering figure of the Japanese New Wave, Imamura (1926–2006) rejected the...

Apr 27, 2009 — The idea of making a film about Japan’s most famous sex crime, with a decent budget and in conditions of complete freedom, reawakened Nagisa Oshima’s desire to direct—and the prospect of circumventing Japanese censorship must have made the decision even...

Apr 22, 2009 — Some of you might have seen the news item on our website regarding the Jacques Tati “centennial-plus” and the exhibits around Paris paying homage to the inventive filmmaker. I had the good fortune to be in the City of Lights...

Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.

Dec 16, 2008 — More than a year ago, Peter and I were in the midst of discussions about how we wanted to launch the Criterion cinematheque. Over time, those discussions expanded to include every department at Criterion. We wanted to have a single...

Nov 27, 2008 — Despite Samuel Fuller’s career-long penchant for giving controversial subjects a punchy, exploitation-movie spin, his twenty-first feature was the first to suffer outright suppression.

Oct 14, 2008 — Okay, quiz time. What does the music video for Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack” have to do with the Criterion Collection? Give up? Well, it was shot by none other than ace director of photography Christopher Doyle, whose work is being brought...

Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s ingenious tale of Viennese cafe society conveys both the transience of individual passions and the durability of passion itself as a motivating force in human behavior.

Aug 18, 2008 — This modest-scale psychological drama by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger follows an explosives expert with a drinking problem who harbors a great deal of bitterness.