The Criterion Collection
Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.
Sep 18, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled...
Essays
Jul 17, 2012 — Down by Law, released in 1986, was Jim Jarmusch’s third movie. Unlike its predecessors, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), it did not take off from a semi-documentary view of downtown Manhattan. It was shot entirely on location...
The creator of perhaps cinema’s most purely spiritual works, this Danish master made films that explored the eternal battle between the spirit and the flesh.
Jun 29, 2010 — Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard had a hard time finding a publisher but was well-known by the time Luchino Visconti began working on his film of the same name. The book appeared in Italy in 1958 and was subsequently...
Short Takes
Mar 8, 2010 — Forty-seven years after Anna Karina communed with The Passion of Joan of Arc’s Maria Falconetti in Vivre sa vie, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Saint Joan continues to inspire artists. According to a Pitchfork Media report, Will Gregory and Adrian Utley, members...
Nov 28, 2006 — Paris. We landed here yesterday at midday, and after a quick stop at our hotel, executive producer Fumiko Takagi and I headed straight to the offices of TF1 and Canal+ in Issy-les-Moulineaux for meetings. Issy is not what you think...
Essays
Sep 9, 2002 — With her debut feature, Lynne Ramsay confirmed herself as one of the most distinct and important voices to emerge from the United Kingdom in recent years.
Aug 20, 2001 — Director Torben Skjødt Jensen discusses the "three aesthetic levels" with which he approaches his documentary portrait.
Nov 8, 1999 — The virgin of Orleans and those matters that surrounded her death began to interest me when the shepherd girl’s canonization in 1920* once again drew the attention of the public-at-large to the events and actions involving her—and not only in...