The Criterion Collection
Aug 14, 2019 — There is a scene in Henry King’s State Fair (1933) that ranks among the most poetic moments in all of 1930s American cinema. There is not much to it, just a family driving through the dusk in their rattling pickup...
Essays
Dec 18, 2018 — Half a century before Julien Duvivier made his 1946 film Panique, the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published his influential study of mob behavior, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, in which he argued that recent upheavals in...
The Daily
Apr 3, 2018 — A little over a month ago now, we posted Marvel mon amour, a video by Daniel Raim in which Stan Lee looked back on working with his good friend Alain Resnais (above with Olga Georges-Picot in Cannes in 1968) on...
The Daily
Aug 19, 2017 — “So about Logan Lucky: I knew in the first shot that I was going to love this movie,” Amy Taubin tells Steven Soderbergh during her interview with him for Film Comment. “I call it the three-shot rule,” says Soderbergh. “After...
Nov 18, 2016 — For Film Comment, Marc Walkow surveys the career of director Tomu Uchida, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Like many commercial Japanese directors of his era, Uchida has long been underappreciated in the West,...
Nov 5, 2015 — Julien Duvivier’s early sound films offer emotionally rich explorations of life in prewar France.
Essays
Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...
Essays
Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”
Jan 21, 2014 — Bigger is better in Stanley Kramer’s crazily crammed slapstick epic, a timeless showcase for comedy genius.
May 9, 2005 — Les Blank’s documentary examines the interaction of premodern tribal existence with European modernity, epitomized by a movie narrative about the invidious clash of brute nature and a singular ego bent on his own mission of cultural enlightenment.