A Man

Sep 3, 2007 — It came from nowhere, it’s always been here—or so Stranger Than Paradise might seem.Jim Jarmusch had completed his first feature, Permanent Vacation, in 1980 and spent the next four years working on his second. Screened a few times as a...

Jan 23, 2006 — Ingmar Bergman was enjoying one of the happiest spells of his life while making The Virgin Spring (1960). On a personal level, he was felicitously ensconced in his fourth marriage, to the concert pianist Käbi Laretei. And, professionally, he was...

Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.

Sep 19, 2005 — When I was a teenage cinephile, in the mid-1970s, Masculin féminin was enormously significant to me. It repre­sented France’s nouvelle vague of the sixties, with its youthful, anarchic spirit of freedom and spontaneity. It was in black and white and...

Aug 2, 2004 — Anna Magnani’s flair for demotic street comedy was transfigured into stylized nobility by sumptuous costuming and Jean Renoir’s formal camera work.

Mar 26, 1998 — In The Lady Vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock pushes the romantic comedy-thriller form to perfection. Endlessly imitated, the film remains unique, even in Hitchcock’s canon. In no other movie but North by Northwest was he able to blend these two genres so...

Sep 25, 1995 — Noel Coward and David Lean’s drama is the Citizen Kane of war movies, as well as the precursor to Lean’s even more celebrated works.

Nov 21, 2008 — Filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker (Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, The War Room) and Chris Hegedus (The War Room, Startup.com), creative partners and husband and wife, offer these favorites. Note: “This list was supposed to be ten in number, but I...

Aug 1, 2019 — A new book and film series survey the many varied ways filmmakers from outside the country have viewed America.

Nov 20, 2008 — We asked director Rian Johnson, whose “high school noir” Brick was one of the most acclaimed films of 2006, what his favorite Criterion releases were. Johnson wrote to us: “I'm a huge Criterion fan. My first exposure to many of...