The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...
Essays
Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.
Jan 21, 2008 — Married thrice and divorced from all of his wives at a time in Western culture when such marital fluctuation was rare, the playwright August Strindberg undoubtedly used his own dramatic life as a sourcebook.
Apr 16, 2007 — Following debates about tensions between police and immigrant communities in France, director Mathieu Kassovitz began a public correspondence with the right-wing minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy.
Jun 27, 2005 — Ko Nakahira’s Nikkatsu Studio youth flick helped transform postwar Japanese cinema.
Sep 29, 2003 — “Gray literature” is the term German film historians use to describe the material written purely for publicity purposes and made available to the press, but not meant for official publication. Often this gray literature, which is only accessible to film...
Sep 29, 2003 — Fassbinder had long dreamed of a “German Hollywood film.” He sought not only success with the audience, but also professionalism. The auteur film in its purest form is an attempt to abolish the division of labor: the filmmaker represents in...
Essays
Jul 17, 2000 — Designed to steam viewers’ glasses, Roger Vadim’s directorial debut boldly announced the arrival of Brigitte Bardot.
Essays
Feb 22, 1999 — To experience a film by Japanese B-movie visionary Seijun Suzuki is to experience Japanese cinema in all its frenzied, voluptuous excess. Born in Tokyo in 1923, Seijun Suzuki is best known for a cycle of extraordinary yakuza (gangster) movies he...