The Criterion Collection
May 5, 2014 — The celebrated divot points manfully toward the crest of the next hill, and the next, and the next, and to the horizon after that. Always forward! Into the sunset! Kirk Douglas is on the move: a wagon train of grimace,...
May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...
Essays
Apr 8, 2014 — In telling the story of the young outcast Antoine Doinel, François Truffaut was moving both backward and forward in time—recalling his own experience while forging a filmic language that would grow more sophisticated throughout the 1960s.
Dec 12, 2013 — A beloved filmmaker in India, the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak digs into his region’s traumatic history in this epic melodrama.
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.
Essays
Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?
Oct 16, 2013 — Georges Franju deftly balances fantasy and realism, clinical detachment and operatic emotion, beauty and pain, all presided over by Edith Scob’s haunting, haunted eyes.
Essays
Aug 13, 2013 — John Frankenheimer burrows into the insidious side of the American sixties in his visually dazzling thriller.
Jul 1, 2013 — How the original comic everyman made us laugh and fear for his life.
Nov 20, 2012 — For a brief, shining moment, the genteel Japanese studio mutated into a fun house of grim ghouls and slimy aliens.