The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 23, 2003 — One of the most unusual features of Italian cinema of the late ’50s and ’60s is the way that it affords us multiple perspectives on the same event, namely the economic boom following the postwar recovery. Where the directors of...
Essays
May 26, 2003 — Embracing the world while pretending to sneer at it, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s crime film is rich, deep, and wily.
Essays
Apr 28, 2003 — Federico Fellini both identifies with and satirizes the provinciality that forms his romantic comedy's central subject.
Apr 28, 2003 — The sense of the difficulty of a real assumption of adulthood gives François Truffaut’s final Antoine Doinel film an undercurrent of anguish, despite its surface lightness.
Apr 28, 2003 — The fourth installment in François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel saga is a comedy about marriage, the desire to escape it, and the craftiness involved in running from one’s own desires.
Apr 28, 2003 — François Truffaut’s third Antoine Doinel installment is a perpetual juggling act by which harsh truths are disguised as light jokes.
Apr 28, 2003 — François Truffaut’s short Antoine Doinel film exposes an entire universe of male adolescent experience.
Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.
Essays
Mar 10, 2003 — Vilgot Sjöman’s cultural-sexual sensation sparked much critical and popular mayhem, only to be consigned to nearly instantaneous oblivion.
Jan 6, 2003 — “No one would claim that Lubitsch’s German films were more important than his American ones (cf. Fritz Lang).” This was Richard Roud’s response to my piece “Ernst Lubitsch: German Period” in his Cinema: A Critical Dictionary. One could indeed ask...