The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Jun 1, 2012 — Though his career was devastatingly brief, Jean Vigo was able to leave behind many unforgettable images that have joined the cinematic pantheon. One of them is undoubtedly Zéro de conduite’s boarding-school insurrectionists in pajamas, whooping it up in slow motion...
Essays
May 25, 2012 — The following article by the filmmaker himself originally appeared in the German newspaper Die Filmwoche on May 20, 1931.
May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.
May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.
In Theaters
May 17, 2012 — Repertory Picks It’s just a Wes kind of week. To coincide with next week’s U.S. opening of his Moonrise Kingdom, the Museum of the Moving Image in New York is launching a complete retrospective of Wes Anderson’s feature films, called...
May 15, 2012 — Circumlocutory critic Perkus Tooth sits down with a very patient Spike Jonze to talk gerunds and colons.
Essays
May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...
May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...
Essays
May 8, 2012 — These thoughts on La haine by director Costa-Gavras first appeared in the program book for the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, where the film was screened. La haine is a phenomenon, in that it is an abnormal, a surprising, and...
Short Takes
Apr 27, 2012 — Film scholar Annette Insdorf does a great job summing up The Unbearable Lightness of Being in her terrific new book on Philip Kaufman.