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...
The only female director of the French New Wave, Agnès Varda has been called both the movement’s mother and its grandmother.
May 29, 2012 — Harriet Andersson’s Monika is both an erotic object and an empowered female protagonist in Bergman’s groundbreaker.
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.
Sneak Peeks
May 21, 2012 — Certified Copy is no ordinary love story. Though it initially seems like a typical romance, featuring two strangers who meet in a picturesque Tuscan town, it is one of the trickiest films in recent memory. Earlier this year, its director,...
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...