The Criterion Collection
Jun 14, 2016 — Alexander Hall’s 1941 film showcased Robert Montgomery’s star power and, with its premise of a death revoked, provided much-needed comic relief to war-worried audiences.
Essays
Apr 27, 2016 — In Phoenix, Christian Petzold sets his nuanced melodrama of postwar German-Jewish identity within a starkly realist aesthetic, making newly fascinating use of his enduring interest in the tensions between the real and the artificial.
Mar 15, 2016 — Set during the height of McCarthy-era paranoia and arriving in 1962, in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John Frankenheimer’s high-anxiety Communist conspiracy thriller tapped into the darkest fears of Cold War America.
Dec 8, 2015 — In Speedy, Harold Lloyd, a comic genius who thought of himself as a quintessentially average American man, places his optimistic everyman character within the context of a society in shift, to great comedic effect.
Aug 12, 2015 — Director Karel Reisz and writer Harold Pinter’s brilliant adaptation of John Fowles’s novel focuses on the experiences of women in two radically different eras.
May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.
Oct 21, 2014 — As breakup songs go, “Dreaming My Dreams with You,” written by country stalwart Allen Reynolds, is a tear-jerking doozy. It first appeared on the 1975 Waylon Jennings album Dreaming My Dreams. And while it’s been covered pretty frequently, by singers...
Sep 23, 2014 — In director Jack Clayton’s hands, Henry James’s tale of the sinister and sensual things hiding behind Victorian decorum becomes one of the screen’s great works of terror.
Essays
May 27, 2014 — Howard Hawks was both a skillful Hollywood craftsman and a deeply personal artist, and this western of uncommon wit and grandeur is among his greatest and quirkiest films.
Oct 21, 2013 — As a film star, John Cassavetes embodied the kinetic, wild-eyed, insanely grinning villain. He seemed born to the role, with his volatile energy and dynamic outbursts, luminous yet curiously deadened eyes, wide-gaping mouth (David Thomson has likened it to a...