The Criterion Collection
Feb 19, 2007 — For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, Mikio Naruse’s drama exhibits a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.
Oct 16, 2006 — Screenwriter Carlos Cuarón delves into the character played by Luis De Icaza.
Essays
Sep 18, 2006 — Nobuo Nakagawa’s legendary, genre-busting Japanese masterpiece explores the infernal desires that tempt us during our mortal existence—and the afterlife agonies awaiting those who succumb.
Apr 24, 2006 — This influential crime thriller, designed purely as a genre exercise, is the first in the long series of anomalies that was Louis Malle’s career.
Apr 17, 2006 — Another movie, another cause célèbre: this mysterious film by Orson Welles has been dismissed as a disaster and hailed as a masterpiece.
Feb 13, 2006 — Jean Renoir’s classic film shows the natural world and the power of technology as wedded through the closely coordinated labor—effected through glances and sign language—of two men.
Sep 26, 2005 — “They were down for each other.” If one wanted to pitch the concept of Bad Timing in six words, this comment by its director, Nicolas Roeg, couldn’t be bettered.
Jan 17, 2005 — Jacques Becker’s genius is to focus resolutely on what comes before or after or falls in between the decisive actions: it’s a crime film where we learn how gangsters brush their teeth.
Aug 2, 2004 — The three film’s in Renoir’s trilogy are comic period fantasies in dazzling color, offering a kind of continuous, bustling choreography in which shifting power relations between upper and lower classes and between spectators and performers literally turn the world into...
Apr 28, 2003 — François Truffaut’s third Antoine Doinel installment is a perpetual juggling act by which harsh truths are disguised as light jokes.