The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Nov 13, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...
Essays
Nov 6, 2012 — When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, produce some of the greatest films ever made, and exert a tremendous and lasting influence on filmmaking...
Oct 30, 2012 — All of them actors? Nearly everyone wears a mask in Roman Polanski’s devilishly clever work of horror.
Sneak Peeks
Oct 26, 2012 — Now here’s a real haunted house for movie lovers. For a special feature on our Blu-ray and DVD editions of his film Cronos, Guillermo del Toro invited us inside his phantasmagorically decorated home offices, which the director has nicknamed Bleak...
Essays
Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...
Oct 23, 2012 — After winning an Oscar, John Schlesinger used his newfound artistic freedom to make a personal film in which homosexuality is treated as groundbreakingly ordinary.
Sneak Peeks
Oct 16, 2012 — The Forgiveness of Blood is set in a place that will be unfamiliar to most viewers. American director Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace) traveled to an isolated, mountainous area in northern Albania to film this tale of a strange...
Oct 16, 2012 — After breaking out with Maria Full of Grace, filmmaker Joshua Marston visited a strange new land with persistent and deadly traditions.
Short Takes
Oct 11, 2012 — On October 11, 1987, David Mamet’s first film, the diabolically tricky House of Games, made its U.S. premiere as the closing-night selection of the New York Film Festival. Mamet had already conquered the world of theater, winning a Pulitzer Prize...
Short Takes
Oct 10, 2012 — Among Kurosawa’s films set in the twentieth century, Ikiru—which you can watch for free on Hulu this week—is probably the most widely seen and beloved. This soul-searching morality tale concerns Watanabe (the haunting Takashi Shimura), a widower and city worker...