The Criterion Collection
Jun 21, 2016 — Animated in Czechoslovakia amid a Soviet invasion, the French film Fantastic Planet, the third collaboration between René Laloux and Roland Topor, timelessly renders its surreal sci-fi story of captivity and resistance.
Jun 4, 2016 — Wim Wenders’s road movies, Michael Almereyda writes, are “at once minimal and romantic, austere and lyrical,” focusing on questions—of individuals and society, culture and nature—that Wenders has returned to throughout his career.
Mar 21, 2016 — Edward Yang’s masterful 1991 adolescent epic telegraphs the tensions and turbulence of 1960s Taiwan, when youth pop culture and teen street gangs became a major societal force.
Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.
Short Takes
Mar 2, 2016 — Over at the Sight & Sound blog, the BFI has just published an insightful and exhaustive article by Albertine Fox about the brilliant career of Anne-Marie Miéville, the Swiss-born multimedia artist and director of several acclaimed features, including: My Dear...
Dec 9, 2015 — With Jellyfish Eyes, Takashi Murakami’s creature feature made in the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 earthquake and nuclear crisis, the international art superstar brings his transcultural vision to the lineage of artist-filmmaker crossovers.
Nov 19, 2015 — Satyajit Ray’s long-heralded cinematic achievement was influenced by European cinema but also grew out of long-standing Indian artistic tradition.
Interviews
Oct 16, 2014 — This past August, on the occasion of Volker Schlöndorff’s being selected for a Silver Medallion award by the Telluride Film Festival, Criterion’s Peter Becker talked with the German filmmaker about his long career. A short version of the conversation was...
Oct 14, 2014 — What happens offscreen is as important as what’s on- in John Ford’s subtle, elegiac take on the Wyatt Earp–Doc Holliday story.
Features
Mar 4, 2014 — The great documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s new movie, made from footage he didn’t use in Shoah, provides a fascinating glipse at the way he began that monumental project.