The Criterion Collection
Jun 10, 2009 — There’s a cornucopia for Tati fans over at Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell’s blog, Observations on Film Art and Film Art. In a new entry, Thompson spotlights painter Jacques Lagrange, a somewhat unsung collaborator on all of Jacques Tati’s films,...
May 3, 2009 — Though primarily a celebration of the best of today’s world cinema, the Cannes Film Festival has for some time now also been making room for the past, with its sidebar Cannes Classics. A program of restored and rediscovered films, Cannes...
Essays
Apr 27, 2009 — Stephen Frears’s gangland drama subverts its genre by removing its villains to an alternate mythic universe, that of the western, as its protagonists traverse the roads that snake through Spain’s arid hills and plains.
Mar 24, 2009 — With a sense of urgency, and a touch of morbidity, Yahoo! Movies has put out a list of “100 Movies to See Before You Die.” “To choose the titles for the list,” write Yahoo!’s editors, “we considered factors like historical...
Essays
Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...
Nov 19, 2008 — My first trip to Paris took place inside the darkened cafeteria of Warnsdorfer Elementary School in East Brunswick, New Jersey. A few times each year, the entire student body was brought together to watch movies cast from a rickety 16...
Essays
Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.
Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.
Jun 25, 2007 — Chris Marker’s masterpiece is a cinematic essay and travel film made up of asides and digressions that form a portrait of late twentieth-century civilization.