The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 2, 2013 — With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.
Sep 23, 2013 — The neorealist master and the Hollywood icon forged a brilliant artistic path together, despite the backlash their controversial romance generated.
Sneak Peeks
Jul 29, 2013 — Guillermo del Toro’s historical thriller and supernatural horror film The Devil’s Backbone is clearly the work of a film artist with an immense imagination. But according to the writer-director, it was also inspired by a real-life experience that haunts him...
May 3, 2013 — Did You See This?• Watch (above) or read Steven Soderbergh’s already famous state-of-the-art address. • Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig hit the streets. • Talk about micro-cinema! • Charting the course of neorealism across continents • Talking to Olivier Assayas,...
Essays
May 25, 2012 — The following article by the filmmaker himself originally appeared in the German newspaper Die Filmwoche on May 20, 1931.
Nov 8, 2011 — Aflurry of publicity around Fanny and Alexander began well before the start of production. Ingmar Bergman said it would be his final film, and he allowed unusual media access to the set, even welcoming a pair of journalists who kept...
Jan 18, 2011 — In his Life Studies poem “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” Robert Lowell wrote of “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge,” a lean, glamorous, tense phrasing that invokes the Samuel Fuller of the early sixties—a director suddenly without...
Essays
Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...
Essays
Feb 17, 2010 — The feature film debut of British artist Steve McQueen, Hunger dramatizes the final weeks in the life of Irish Republican Army commander Bobby Sands and his death by hunger strike, aged twenty-seven, in 1981. Combining intense formal control and extreme...
Nov 3, 2009 — If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece.