The Criterion Collection
Mar 21, 2011 — Living Room The cinema of Mikio Naruse is one of heartbreak but also one of indomitable poise. Melodrama is the director’s stock-in-trade. His stories are inhabited by people, generally women, imprisoned in their domestic and professional circumstances by the status...
Jun 23, 2010 — “Wittily written and spare as a coded message . . . The year’s most perilous ride . . . , we wouldn’t exchange it for a season’s commutation ticket on most of the similar vehicles running out of Hollywood.” So...
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.
Mar 17, 2008 — In its portrayal of the long international arm of crime families, Alberto Lattuada’s ingenious comedy offers a prescient look at globalization.
Sep 17, 2007 — I set out on my first trip to the Toronto Film Festival ready to feast on films and spend relaxed, indulgent, quality time with writers I work with, or hope to work with, as the editorial director here at Criterion....
Sep 3, 2007 — Aconversation, a misunderstanding. The basic pattern in many of Jim Jarmusch’s films is two characters, sometimes three, bound together by chance and wandering along toward an ill-defined goal, each trying all the while to get to know the other or...
Sep 3, 2007 — As the opening credits for Night on Earth begin to roll, we are informed that the film is a Locus Solus Production. A curious name, no doubt unfamiliar to most people, but one that reveals a great deal about Jim...
Sep 3, 2007 — Iwas a cab driver once myself (in Los Angeles, in the mid-1970s), and I’ve been sensitive ever since to how the profession is portrayed on the screen. As it happened, I was driving a cab when Taxi Driver came out,...
Mar 19, 2007 — In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book,...
Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s coming-of-age drama offers an unusually full and individualized characterization of a boy whose yearnings, sensitivities, and fantasies outstrip his personality.