The Criterion Collection
Essays
Oct 30, 2014 — Tati’s witty visual comedy also functioned as satire of a rapidly modernizing postwar France.
Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.
Aug 18, 2014 — The director explains the inspiration for his provocative erotic comedy, and how he dove into it even before finishing his previous movie.
Jul 29, 2014 — The writer and director is inspired by Lawrence Kasdan’s classic comic drama to consider the joys and disappointments of the baby boomer generation that begot her.
May 12, 2014 — The Italian cinema expert describes the immense popularity of Dino Risi’s film in its home country, and the way it deepened the commedia all’italiana genre.
Essays
May 6, 2014 — This humorous magazine piece from 1970 sheds some light on the meaning of the title of Il sorpasso, along with the way Vittorio Gassman comports himself behind the wheel in it.
May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...
Feb 17, 2014 — Flailing fathers, anxious mothers, and their moody offspring—these characters may have tails, but they’re Wes Anderson people through and through.
Essays
Dec 2, 2013 — With its dazzling array of characters, acerbic take on American entertainment and politics, and innovative approach to sound, this is the ultimate Robert Altman movie.
Oct 24, 2013 — In John Cassavetes’s personal cinema, the director was always trying to break away from the formulas of Hollywood narrative, in order to uncover some fugitive truth about the way people behave. At the same time, he took seriously his responsibilities...