The Criterion Collection
Features
Jun 22, 2020 — Songbook At first it’s just one of many Fellini-esque dances: a band switches to an upbeat tune, Nino Rota’s “Caracalla’s (La Bersagliera),” and a previously dour party becomes an impromptu circle of ecstatic movement. Though overshadowed in La dolce vita...
Features
Jun 15, 2020 — The hugely popular and prolific Italian actor Alberto Sordi relished playing rogues, characters riddled with foibles and weaknesses. In an interview with Positif’s Jean A. Gili in 1999, he revealed that his aim was to depict in a comic register...
Apr 8, 2020 — Plus Godard on Instagram, Almodóvar from Madrid, and John Sayles on his favorite movies.
Jun 17, 2019 — Renowned for his adaptations of Shakespeare and great operas, the director was also a controversial Italian senator and stood accused of sexual misconduct.
Essays
Mar 21, 2019 — “The world is full of skeptics,” Detour’s Al Roberts struggles to explain, in voice-over, while on-screen we’re pondering Vera’s dead body. “I know. I’m one myself . . .”Even now, closing in on seventy-five years after the Producers Releasing Corporation...
Features
Dec 20, 2017 — In her latest column, critic Imogen Sara Smith explains how cinematographer Henri Decaë brought a risk-taking spirit and seductive allure to some of the most iconic French crime films.
Aug 31, 2017 — Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, premiering in Competition in Venice and screening as a Special Presentation in Toronto, is a “ravishing, eccentric auteur’s imagining, spilling artistry, empathy and sensuality from every open pore, [offering] more straight-up movie for...
Essays
Dec 14, 2016 — Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.
Essays
Oct 26, 2016 — The tropes of light comedy give way to a Kafkaesque nightmare in this incendiary critique of moral rot in Franco-era Spain.
Oct 3, 2016 — Polish music icon Zbigniew Preisner, who first worked with the Dekalog director on 1985’s No End and went on to contribute to all of his subsequent films. Here, we present a selected playlist of Preisner’s most memorable work for Kieślowski.