The Criterion Collection
Apr 2, 2009 — It was announced this week that Rialto Pictures founder and Criterion friend Bruce Goldstein will receive the 2009 San Francisco International Film Festival Mel Novikoff award, “given annually to an individual or institution whose work has enhanced the filmgoing public’s...
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...
Dec 21, 2008 — In 1962, Roberto Rossellini called a press conference in a bookshop in Rome and announced that the cinema was dead. “There’s a crisis not just in film but culture as a whole,” he explained. Increasingly, Rossellini had understood the great...
Dec 4, 2008 — With Ron Howard’s big-screen adaptation of Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon opening today, the editors at New York magazine remind us that Frank Langella is hardly the first actor to get all jowly for the camera. They’ve put together a list...
Essays
Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...
Sep 30, 2008 — 9 August 2008: I go to the neighborhood theater to see Snow Trail (a.k.a. To the End of the Silver Mountains, a.k.a. Ginrei no haté), a 1946 Senkichi Taniguchi film now revived because it was Toshiro Mifune’s second film. Revived...
Sep 17, 2007 — G. W. Pabst’s adaptation of the play by Bertolt Brecht transforms the original without betraying it, softening its cynicism with humanity and integrating elements of psychoanalysis.
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,...
Jul 23, 2007 — It’s hard to think of an artist who better exemplifies the obscuring ebb and flow of film history than Raymond Bernard.
Apr 16, 2007 — Jules Dassin’s noir is arguably the meatiest and most resonant prison film ever made in Hollywood, drawing explicit parallels to the Nazi encampment experience.