The Criterion Collection
Production Notes
Jul 7, 2008 — Sometimes it’s pretty tough for me to divorce my inner fanboy from the (probably unrealistic) ideal of a business-only, detached producer. One such moment was when I saw that Anthony Mann’s The Furies was a part of our Paramount deal....
Jun 30, 2008 — The novelist Mishima Yukio stepped behind the camera to adapt his own short story, which depicts the act of seppuku as a thing of beauty.
Jun 23, 2008 — Five years of increasingly horrific news from the former Yugoslavia made Milcho Manchevski’s searing yet lyrical film timely to a degree that few filmmakers have ever achieved.
Jun 12, 2008 — Spring is ready to surrender to summer here in the Big Apple, and in keeping with my intentions, I sat down and watched The Love Parade and Monte Carlo from the Lubitsch Musicals Eclipse set. I found them to be...
Essays
Feb 18, 2008 — At the climax of Alex Cox’s Walker (1987), a helicopter descends from the night sky onto a plaza where the colonial buildings are ablaze and an army of mercenaries is disintegrating . . .
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.
Nov 19, 2007 — Akira Kurosawa explores criminal machismo in his seventh film, which he felt was his official breakthrough in Japanese cinema.
Sep 17, 2007 — G. W. Pabst’s adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht transforms the original without betraying it, softening its cynicism with humanity and integrating elements of psychoanalysis.
Essays
Sep 17, 2007 — Today we are used to seeing dance artistically presented on television and in movies—these films about Martha Graham helped to make that happen.
Sep 3, 2007 — Jim Jarmusch is a difficult director because he works from the frontiers. What does it mean to be a “frontier” director in the film world today?It means a clear refusal, for ethical and aesthetic reasons, to be part of the...