The Criterion Collection
Nov 7, 2005 — Often appearing on lists of the ten greatest films of all time, called one of the most beautiful films ever made, or the most masterful work of Japanese cinema, Ugetsu comes to us awash in superlatives. No less acclaimed has...
Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.
Essays
Jul 25, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki’s drama sees sexuality as a potent anarchic force that, in its implacable selfishness, brushes aside any sort of order or discipline.
Essays
Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...
Jun 13, 2005 — Ernst Lubitsch was a big-city director. The historical dramas that he made in Germany in the late 1910s and early 1920s were known around the world for their distinctively urbane approach, focusing on the private lives of public people. This...
Essays
Apr 25, 2005 — Andrzej Wajda’s first feature film marks the beginning of the Polish School, the paradigm of Polish cinema that arose from the political and cultural thaw of the mid-1950s.
Mar 14, 2005 — A director is naturally a man like everyone else. Yet his life isn’t normal. For us, seeing is a necessity. For a painter, too, the problem is to see. But while the painter has to discover a static reality, or...
Essays
Feb 14, 2005 — A touchstone of Jean-Luc Godard‘s political period, the film plays with the idea of recording working-class history as it is happening.
Essays
Jan 31, 2005 — With this early work, Bernardo Bertolucci confidently demonstrated the instinctive lyricism and sensuality that in his maturity would become his very own signature.
Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.