The Criterion Collection
These two filmmakers forged an alliance that lasted from the late thirties to the early seventies, making their mark on the world of British cinema by always going against its realist strain.
In the late sixties and early seventies, young, innovative, and politically radical directors took up arms against the propriety of West German society and its failing film industry.
With this vital movement, Italian filmmakers delivered an urgent response to political and economic turmoil in the wake of World War II.
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.
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.
Oct 9, 2008 — Lola Montès, Max Ophuls’s final film and some would say greatest masterpiece, opened today in New York and Los Angeles in what is being touted as the definitive restoration. Butchered by its producers and a flop on initial release in...
Oct 6, 2008 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s ninth and to that point most commercially successful feature in France, was an important watershed in the director’s career.
Essays
Oct 6, 2008 — It is pretty much a convention of the hard-boiled gangster picture that most, if not all, of the principal characters wind up dead by the final shot. So it ought not constitute a “spoiler” to note that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le...
Sep 29, 2008 — After Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, some thirty-two diaries were discovered. They were from 1933 to 1963, and though a few years were missing, they offer a commentary on the life of the director and reveal...
Essays
Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.