The Criterion Collection
Jan 21, 2008 — In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s...
Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.
Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....
Oct 15, 2007 — One of Spain’s most acclaimed and prolific directors, Carlos Saura emerged as an artist in the late 1950s under Franco’s dictatorship and immediately made his mark as an incisive, if necessarily allusive, social and political commentator.
Apr 16, 2007 — Following debates about tensions between police and immigrant communities in France, director Mathieu Kassovitz began a public correspondence with the right-wing minister of the interior Nicolas Sarkozy.
Feb 19, 2007 — A powerful document of anti-Nazi propaganda, Powell and Pressburger’s war drama consolidated their partnership and showed a way forward for British cinema.
Feb 12, 2007 — Vittorio De Sica’s seminal drama renounces “egoism” for collective concern, envisioning a cinema of impassioned social conscience.
Dec 1, 2006 — We left St-Michel feeling uplifted and took a nice stroll south, past the Closerie des Lilas, the restaurant made famous by Hemingway, and through the Luxembourg gardens, where a film crew was laying dolly tracks and fitting counterweights on a...
Essays
Oct 16, 2006 — Lodge Kerrigan’s grim, lucid dispatch from the murky depths of madness situates itself inside the tormented consciousness of a schizophrenic.