A Little Light

Oct 22, 2013 — The disc of Faces that you now hold is the most beautiful copy possible of a film that was meant to look lousy. Digital technology painstakingly reproduces John Cassavetes’s lighting, which allowed his actors to move about freely, and so...

Jul 23, 2013 — Asked by French journalists in a 2001 interview what recent films he most admired, Brian De Palma named Ang Lee’s 1997 The Ice Storm. It was surprising to hear one of the leaders of a filmmaking revolution that aimed at...

May 14, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s classic western is psychologically probing, magnificently shot, and fascinatingly ambiguous.

Jan 16, 2013 — Both sparkling and suspenseful, Alfred Hitchcock’s benchmark thriller is the perfect getaway, and it set the scene for much of the master’s later work.

Nov 14, 2012 — Jean Luc Godard’s exuberant, multipronged attack on the bourgeoisie is both theater of the absurd and political horror.

Sep 20, 2012 — The following is excerpted from a 1990 audio interview that originally appeared on the Criterion Collection’s laserdisc edition of Children of Paradise. It was conducted by the late Brian Stonehill, who was a communications and media studies professor at Pomona...

Jun 11, 2012 — Charlie Chaplin’s transcendent, visionary comedy is made up of one iconic moment after another.

May 29, 2012 — Harriet Andersson’s Monika is both an erotic object and an empowered female protagonist in Bergman’s groundbreaker.

Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...

Nov 15, 2011 — “The day I can buy toilet paper in a Polish store, I’ll discuss politics,” Krzysztof Kieślowski told an interviewer in 1989, as he brushed aside a question. He was speaking at the Montreal Film Festival, where he was serving on...