The Criterion Collection
Essays
Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...
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.
Essays
May 12, 2008 — If ever an actor could reconcile his natural-born swagger with a kind of pervasive lethargy it was Maurice Ronet, the star of Louis Malle’s staggering psychological drama.
Aug 28, 2007 — Having studied everything but film in college, I never would have imagined that landing a job in the DVD industry would help me get more out of fashion magazines. But sitting in the front office at Criterion, seeing every person...
Tech Corner
Aug 14, 2007 — When I found out last year that we’d be working on Days of Heaven, I got goose bumps. It’s always been one of my favorite films, and I had wished it could be in the Criterion Collection ever since I...
Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.
Feb 21, 2007 — It was bound to happen. After a good start for the blog, a quiet stretch. The year has gotten off to a busy start. Every minute there seems to be a meeting with a new player about a new technology...
Jan 4, 2007 — As we get back from vacation, the e-mail boxes are full. Kim, several of the other producers, and I have been doing our best to get to it all, but it’s beginning to pile up. We’ve been pretty good about...
Dec 7, 2006 — Almost exactly twelve years ago, we were fervently working on the launch of a big website with tons of content called voyagerco.com. This was in the fall of 1994, and if you're wondering how long ago that was in web...
Nov 30, 2006 — We've been all over the city in the past couple of days, lugging around the fourteen-pound Janus box in a prototype Janus tote, feeling a little like traveling salesmen, but it's okay, because Paris is just so beautiful, even on...