From Karkhe to Rhein

Mar 8, 2010 — Congratulations to Friday’s winner, Dan! Dan’s caption for this screenshot from Throne of Blood was: The Emperor initially resisted the switch from plastic bags to cloth. March is Akira Kurosawa month at Criterion. On the twenty-third, the great Japanese filmmaker...

Dec 14, 2009 — Almost sixty years ago, George Bernard Shaw died at age ninety-four, leaving behind an unfinished play. Tonight, in New York, that final work from the Pygmalion writer, Why She Would Not, will be presented in a reading by the Gingold...

Dec 6, 2009 — Jim Ellis’s insightful new book, Derek Jarman’s Angelic Conversations (University of Minnesota Press), builds from the premise that “Jarman is the mostimportant Anglo-American gay director in the post-Stonewall era, although it is surprising that, to my knowledge, no one has ever...

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Dec 1, 2009 — Running a taut ninety-one minutes, this documentary about the Rolling Stones is a masterpiece of restraint and understatement.

Dec 1, 2009 — New York artist Jason Polan (known to Criterion fans as the guy behind the “wacky animals” in our monthly newsletters) has been on a mission that’s, to put it mildly, ambitious. The goal of his ongoing drawing project, Every Person...

Oct 19, 2009 — Though known primarily for her wildly varied, continent-hopping features (Salaam Bombay!, Mississippi Masala, Vanity Fair, The Namesake), Indian director Mira Nair has for the past three decades also been forging a parallel career of short filmmaking. Both fiction (Migration, How...

Oct 18, 2009 —  So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...

Oct 12, 2009 — Man is Not a Bird: Flying Away The term “independent cinema” has lost its punch in recent years, from overuse and misapplication. One need only look to the films of Dušan Makavejev for a reminder of its true meaning. This...

Sep 22, 2009 — Abandoning the cinematic conventions and references that informed his previous works, Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive crime drama reaches new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention.