The Criterion Collection
May 3, 2011 — French auteur cinema has increasingly been exploring themes of sex through scenarios whose explicitness verges on the pornographic. Along with Patrice Chéreau (Intimacy, 2001), Léos Carax (Pola X, 1999), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi (Baise-moi, 2000), and Gaspar Noé...
Short Takes
Apr 27, 2011 — As those immersed in American film culture know, Austin, Texas, has been a growing hub of activity for the past twenty years. With the Austin Film Society, such locally based filmmakers as Richard Linklater and John Pierson, the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the Austin Film Festival, the city...
Essays
Apr 25, 2011 — Brian De Palma brought hip, freewheeling funkiness to the American film renaissance of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Wised-up, cinema-savvy audiences across the country knew to seek out his movies for their scruffy wit, showmanship, and aesthetic innovation, not...
Apr 12, 2011 — After Army of Shadows, Melville and I stayed in touch . . . One day, he announced: “I’m going to make a new film. You’re not composing the score for it; I’ve contacted Michel Legrand . . .” Of course, I was disappointed....
Apr 12, 2011 — The following is excerpted from Melville on Melville, a book-length interview by Rui Nogueira first published in 1971. How do you feel about your twelfth film, Le cercle rouge? Since there’s no knowing if there will be a thirteenth, l...
Apr 11, 2011 — I believe in my world. I believe in brotherhood and everything that goes with it. Like honor, loyalty, and friendship. The reason why Le cercle rouge is a classic gangster film is because it embodies this kind of romanticism. For...
Essays
Feb 22, 2011 — Andrea Arnold seemed to emerge out of nowhere with Red Road (2006), her revelatory, shrewdly observed debut feature about voyeurism and sexual revenge. That film won Arnold multiple awards, and she had already earned an Oscar for her short Wasp...
Essays
Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...
Features
Feb 2, 2011 — These tributes first appeared in the winter 2010 issue of Brick, a literary journal based in Toronto. They are posted here by permission of the authors. The photographs appear courtesy of Colleen Murphy. Colleen Murphy After we decided to...
Short Takes
Jan 10, 2011 — Stage-bound is not a term one is apt to associate with the minimalist, resolutely un-dialogue-driven movie worlds of Michelangelo Antonioni. But that hasn’t deterred Ivo van Hove (the artistic director of the Netherlands’ most acclaimed theater company) from adapting three...