The Criterion Collection
May 26, 2016 — During the conductor and composer’s visit—a day after he’d led the New York Philharmonic in a live orchestral performance of the score to City Lights—we talked about his love for early cinema, the delicate process of restoring Chaplin’s music, and...
Mar 24, 2015 — Words—they conceal and reveal so much about us, as Errol Morris’s elusive and brilliant first films attest.
Nov 17, 2014 — Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable’s effortless banter is pure magic, but Frank Capra’s comedy is rooted in the reality of the times.
May 19, 2014 — As in his other films, the world of Abbas Kiarostami’s latest is one of simulation, not-quite-realness, and unexpected tenderness.
Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.
Essays
Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.
Aug 23, 2011 — Intimidation: The Weird Dream MakerImpassioned and dedicated craftsman of some of Japanese cinema’s biggest box-office successes and most eccentric off-genre sorties, longtime Nikkatsu studios mainstay Koreyoshi Kurahara (1927–2002) was a filmmaker with two opposite yet inseparable signature points of view....
Sep 10, 2009 — Is That Hamilton Woman, starring Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier at their most heart-stoppingly beautiful and mutually enraptured, one of the most romantic movies ever made because or in spite of the fact that it was designed as propaganda? It...
Jan 21, 2009 — It’s a clichéd truism that moviemaking is a collaborative art. Of course it is, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of directors working time and again with the same crew members, trusted writers, cameramen, production designers, editors,...
Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.