The Criterion Collection
Jun 16, 2009 — In Tempo di viaggio (1983), the doodle Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra made for Italian TV as they prepped Nostalghia, the great struggling Russian answers a question about genre films by saying that his Solaris (1972) is “not so good,”...
Jan 22, 2009 — I’ve fulfilled a dream to become a part of the Criterion family. Criterion has helped to preserve not only the films I grew up with but also the ones I’m now trying to keep up with. Picking ten is worse...
Feb 21, 2007 — It was bound to happen. After a good start for the blog, a quiet stretch. The year has gotten off to a busy start. Every minute there seems to be a meeting with a new player about a new technology...
Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.
Essays
May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.
Mar 18, 2003 — Director William Dieterle’s 1941 film adaptation of Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” is a melodramatic fever dream, a hallucinatory tour de force.
Nov 11, 2002 — Continued from Anatomy of a Love Festival - Part One The real turn-on, though, was the music—twenty-two hours of it, divided into solid chunks that usually ran more than thirty minutes. Friday night was the epitome of what San Francisco...
Essays
Jun 18, 2001 — Bathed in scarlet hues, Ingmar Bergman’s period drama is his most daring attempt to achieve a dream state on film.
Essays
Dec 31, 1999 — As a tour de force of screen acting, Autumn Sonata stands unchallenged as the finest work of Ingmar Bergman’s last few years as a movie director. Fanny and Alexander may have won the Oscars, but Autumn Sonata represents Bergman’s chamber...
The actor and filmmaker talks about the comedic genius of The Awful Truth, reflects on Andrei Tarkovsky’s dream sequences, and selects films starring screen legends like Jeanne Moreau and Simone Signoret.