The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 24, 1999 — Before The Red Shoes, there were films with dance numbers. After it, there was a new medium which combined dance, design, and music in a dreamlike spectacle. Hollywood musicals were quick to pay tribute—An American in Paris was the most...
Essays
Apr 26, 1999 — At some point in their lives, probably every sleepless person has switched on the TV in the wee hours of a weekend morning and chanced upon a fishing show. Invariably, a beefy, half-forgotten retired athlete shares a boat with some...
Essays
Mar 29, 1999 — Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits was the most critically well-received children’s film in nearly two decades—and also the most challenging and rewarding fantasy-adventure movie since Alexander Korda’s The Thief of Bagdad, released forty-one years earlier. At the dawn of the 1980s,...
Essays
Feb 22, 1999 — Flipping around the channels of late-night TV in my Tokyo apartment in 1984 I came across what seemed like a B movie from the ’60s. The studio: Nikkatsu. The star: Joe Shishido. The director: Seijun Suzuki. I was not at...
Essays
Feb 1, 1999 — Rob Reiner’s directorial debut documents a recent moment in the band’s checkered history—one that only coincidentally represents a brief decline in the sine wave of their careers.
Essays
Feb 1, 1999 — After finishing Diabolique, heralded French director-screenwriter Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) confessed that all he had intended was to make a picture that would “amuse myself” and please a young girl who hid under the covers and asked her father to frighten...
Essays
Jan 11, 1999 — David Lean followed his prodigious adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations with this brilliant crystallization of Dickens’ Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. It deploys the cinema’s special powers of dash and immediacy to convey all the venturesomeness and...
Jan 11, 1999 — This epic reimagining of medieval Russia was the most historically audacious production made in the twenty-odd years after Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.
Essays
Nov 23, 1998 — Paul Morrissey’s cult classic has obvious appeal for the lover of Grand Guignol—but it equally addresses the thoughtful.
Essays
Nov 23, 1998 — Paul Morrissey’s gory comedy may be sensationally shlocky, yet it explores profound ideas about sexual liberty, individualistic freedom, and the commodification of everyday life.