Shadows

Mar 17, 2010 — 1. A Park—Night A man aflame is running directly toward camera. This image, which comes from Nicholas Ray’s initial treatment for Rebel Without a Cause, might stand at the head of almost any of Ray’s movies, since it so clearly...

Feb 2, 2010 — Dear Criterion collectors, Our three least favorite initials: OOP. Since we launched the Criterion Collection more than twenty-five years ago, we’ve endeavored to keep everything we’ve published in print. But despite our efforts to renew rights, we are losing a...

Oct 6, 2009 — Our Jeanne Dielman–Criterion Collection Cooking Video Contest on YouTube has been a huge success, thanks to scores of filmmakers who served up more than fifty delectable entries! We’ve been amazed at the quality of the submissions, and now we need...

Sep 22, 2009 — Abandoning the cinematic conventions and references that informed his previous works, Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive crime drama reaches new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention.

Sep 17, 2009 — Almost twenty years before they enacted such splendid suffocation in Max Ophuls’s swoony masterpiece The Earrings of Madame de . . . , the agelessly glamorous Charles Boyer and Danielle Darrieux first starred together in another tear-jerking big-screen romance. Giving...

Sep 17, 2009 — Le jour se lève was Marcel Carné’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert and their third entry in the poetic realism cinema movement, following their vanguard Drôle de drame and Port of Shadows. Both of those films were...

Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....

Jul 27, 2009 — We enter Roman Polanski’s harrowing Repulsion as if in the middle of the story, but it’s actually the beginning of the end. Polanski unceremoniously drops us into a beauty salon where a pampered matron takes to task our heroine, a...

Jul 8, 2009 — I’ll never forget that first step on the moon. I was at the home of a high school classmate in Fort Worth on the evening of July 20, 1969. The Eagle had landed that afternoon, and we’d been waiting for...

Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.