The Criterion Collection
Sep 13, 2004 — Fifteen years ago I received a letter from a young film director in Texas, who enclosed a tape of his first film, with the unlikely title It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. It might as well have...
Sep 13, 2004 — About a year and a half ago, a friend and I found ourselves exiled to a cold Midwestern city, where we spent most of our time missing the lazy Texas college town that shaped our idea of the good life....
Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...
Dec 16, 1991 — Lady for a Day represented a watershed in the career of Frank Capra. The young director had been laboring at Columbia Pictures’ Poverty Row Studio, churning out 18 films in less than six years. He had moved from low-budget programmers...
Essays
Jul 15, 1991 — For only his second studio film, Peter Bogdanovich chanced directing an adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s elegiac novel about teenagers who come of age in a dying Texas town in the early fifties.
May 31, 1990 — Isabelle Huppert shot from minor actress to full-fledged French star with a mesmerizing performance as, ironically, a young woman who is incapable of escaping anonymity. In Swiss director Claude Goretta’s elegant, beautifully observed tragedy/character study, Huppert is “Pomme,” a lovely,...
This native of Houston, Texas, has influenced countless young independent filmmakers with his authentic portraits of adolescence and romantic discovery.
The actor talks about how Richard Linklater’s Slacker turned him on to independent cinema, praises the soundtrack for Paris, Texas, and selects a horror classic by George A. Romero.
The actor praises performances by Holly Hunter and Naomi Watts, reminisces about how Paris, Texas changed her understanding of cinema, and talks about Mike Leigh’s films as works of operatic tension.
The front man of the band Neon Indian—who just released his debut solo album, World of Hassle—praises the “completely demented” Maîtresse, discusses the representation of Texas in True Stories, and gives us his best Peter Falk impression.