The Criterion Collection
Apr 28, 2009 — For his ongoing series “Philip French’s Screen Legends,” begun in January 2008 on the Guardian’s website, the British film critic has been profiling the “great actors in film, choosing their key works and assessing their legacy,” in neat little encapsulations....
Apr 16, 2009 — If you’re feeling symptoms of Edie-itis lately—wearing sweaters and towels as kerchiefs, doing impromptu soft-shoes around the house, unexpectedly calling your mom “Mothuh, dahling”—don’t worry, you’re not alone. Something is definitely in the air.Staunch fans of the Maysles brothers’ 1976...
Feb 2, 2009 — We’ve been having some trouble handling preorders through our new store. A significant number of our customers have been distressed to find that their credit card was charged at the time they preordered items from our site rather than when...
Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...
Essays
Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.
Production Notes
Apr 1, 2008 — As a generation of artists passes, the deaths often seem to come eerily close together, amplifying their individual achievements. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve lost The Naked City screenwriter Malvin Wald, then the incomparable Richard Widmark, and now...
Sep 3, 2007 — Very few movies count as truly significant milestones in the development of American “indie” cinema during the last quarter of the twentieth century. They include Eraserhead (1977) and Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), as early trailblazers; She’s Gotta Have...
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...
Feb 16, 2004 — In this quintessential noir, Samuel Fuller breaks with the Red Scare formula of his contemporaries by contrasting the faceless evil of Communism against the peccadilloes of the workaday American crook.
Essays
Aug 4, 2003 — Shohei Imamura’s lurid black comedy showcases the director’s passion for everything that’s kinky, lowlife, or irrational in Japanese culture.