The Criterion Collection
May 25, 2017 — “Leave it to Kiyoshi Kurosawa, our favorite director of B movies that look like art films (or are they the other way around?), to upturn the nostalgia for American blockbusters of the 1980s,” begins Daniel Kasman in the Notebook. “Japan’s...
Jan 13, 2016 — In Bitter Rice, Giuseppe De Santis focused his lens on the world of Italy’s female rice workers, for a story that’s part social commentary, part pulp melodrama—and introduced the world to a dazzling young actress named Silvana Mangano.
Essays
Nov 25, 2015 — Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film about one man’s mortality offers a study in postwar Japan, Kurosawa vs. Ozu, and the realization that knowing how to die requires learning how to be alive.
Jun 17, 2015 — Taking the form of a casual conversation, Louis Malle’s film about transformative experiences is an outgrowth of its writer-stars’ experimental theater days.
May 27, 2015 — Costa-Gavras’s political drama sheds disturbing light on the violent methods used by governments to maintain order.
Sep 20, 2013 — Did You See This?• J. Hoberman revisits Shock Corridor. • Watercoloring the movies • Donald Richie to be honored • Time Bandits’ journey to the screen • Adam Curtis’s documentary attack • Howard Hampton slacks off. • Agnès Varda then...
Jun 11, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman’s classic character study is a moving depiction of aging and regret but also joy and forgiveness.
Feb 25, 2013 — When an ethnographic filmmaker and a sociologist joined forces, they helped change the course of nonfiction cinema.
Short Takes
Sep 13, 2012 — Horror fans might assume that director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies wrote the book on cursed bibles of the damned. But years earlier, in 1967, The Equinox . . . A Journey into the Supernatural, one of the films in this week’s...
Apr 17, 2012 — When it was first released in 1977, ¡Alambrista! depicted something previously unseen in American fiction films—the lives of undocumented Mexican immigrants from their point of view. Though writer-director-cinematographer Robert M. Young was not Latino and didn’t speak Spanish, his film convincingly...