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Apr 23, 2009 — These profiles of the real-life Sada Abé and the actress who portrayed her in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses first appeared in Donald Richie’s 1987 book Different People: Pictures of Some Japanese, and can also be found...

Mar 30, 2009 — Among the great Polish filmmakers—Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland, Roman Polanski—Andrzej Wajda stands out as the one most concerned with national identity and memory.

Mar 16, 2009 — Dave Kehr heralds the rediscovery of “the oceanic depth and diversity of Japanese cinema” in recent years, “thanks in no small part to home video,” in a lovely New York Times piece on the latest example of that, Eclipse Series...

Feb 22, 2009 — “If there’s such a thing as an ideal time of day to expose yourself to the deranging, hallucinatory visions of the Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, midnight might well be it,” writes critic and Criterion contributor Terrence Rafferty in a terrific...

Dec 18, 2008 — Check out Chris Ware’s lovely tribute to Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story on the cover of the November/December Cinefamily calendar. The Cinefamily shows its eclectic (“exceptional, distinctive, weird, and wonderful”) programs at Hollywood’s Silent Movie Theatre, whose co-owner, Sammy Harkham, is...

Dec 10, 2008 — Renowned author, film scholar, and Wong Kar-wai well-wisher David Bordwell takes a peek at the new Criterion edition of Chungking Express on his personal blog. Bordwell, who’s written about the artistry of this dynamic auteur in his books Planet Hong...

Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.

Oct 20, 2008 — Costa-Gavras’s film pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role.

Jul 21, 2008 — A dreamy alternative to the standard notion of horror, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s phantasmal film reimagined the figure of the vampire.

Jul 16, 2008 — The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled...