The Criterion Collection
Sep 19, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s tale of love and devilry in medieval France was a sensation during the German occupation.
With themes of love, suffering, betrayal, sacrifice, and redemption, melodrama puts its audiences through the emotional wringer.
Essays
May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...
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...
Essays
Oct 6, 2007 — In Gus Van Sant’s first feature, gayness—blind, unembarrassed homosexual lust—is the narrative’s driving force.
Short Takes
Nov 17, 2015 — This week marks the first occasion of the Criterion Blogathon, a massive movie lovefest organized by the film blog Criterion Blues.
The Daily
May 22, 2017 — “Michael Haneke is back to many of his old tricks in Happy End, which enfolds the child psychopathy of Benny’s Video, the bourgeois nightmare of Hidden, the euthanasia theme of Amour, and the racial discomfort of Code Unknown into a...
Jun 22, 2009 — So much critical ink has been shed over Last Year at Marienbad that one might wonder if the flood of commentary, once receded, would take the film along with it. Alain Resnais’ second feature has been lavishly praised and royally...
Mar 27, 2009 — Thanks to IFC Daily’s David Hudson for tipping us off to a couple of top-notch articles this week marking the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave. That’s right, it was fifty years ago, in May to be precise, that...