The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Jun 8, 2012 — Has there ever been a more pliable villain than the title character in The Blob? The sticky star of Pennsylvania minister–turned–movie director Irvin S. Yeaworth’s 1958 cult classic—one of the titles highlighted in this week’s festival of free Criterion films on Hulu, all...
In Theaters
Jun 7, 2012 — Repertory PicksA film noir series is currently casting a long shadow over the Omaha movie theater Film Streams. The upcoming week’s selections include two prime crime melodramas from the fifties, both frenetic dispatches from the height of the cold war:...
May 29, 2012 — Harriet Andersson’s Monika is both an erotic object and an empowered female protagonist in Bergman’s groundbreaker.
May 29, 2012 — A watershed film in Bergman’s career, this tale of a woman caught between the past and present is a masterful study in darkness and light.
May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.
May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.
May 15, 2012 — Circumlocutory critic Perkus Tooth sits down with a very patient Spike Jonze to talk gerunds and colons.
Short Takes
May 11, 2012 — We spread the word about Larisa Shepitko, one of the true visionaries of Soviet cinema, when we released two of her incredible films in 2008, but she remains an under-the-radar figure for most movie lovers. By 1979, when she was...
Essays
May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...