The Criterion Collection
Visual Analysis
Dec 21, 2016 — Under the InfluenceEarlier this month, director Mike Mills paid a visit to New York in support of his third narrative feature, 20th Century Women, a deeply personal coming-of-age tale about a teenage boy growing up in Carter-era Southern California with...
Mar 18, 2016 — For the past thirty years, the British Film Institute has been honoring the best in contemporary and classic LGBT cinema from around the world, with its annual BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival. In celebration of the festival’s three-decade anniversary...
Short Takes
Jan 25, 2016 — Last week, we were saddened to learn of the passing, at the age of eighty-four, of the beloved Italian writer and director Ettore Scola. The filmmaker was a luminary of Italian cinema for more than half a century, and his...
Mar 11, 2015 — More than thirty years after his death in 1977, Roberto Rossellini is remembered by your average film buff as the father of Italian neorealism (Rome, Open City, 1945; Paisan, 1946; Germany Year Zero, 1948) and of actress and model Isabella...
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.
Apr 27, 2014 — A leading light of commedia all’italiana, Dino Risi specialized in fleet, satirical takes on contemporary Italian culture, and this road-trip smash was his most trenchant.
Sneak Peeks
Apr 23, 2014 — Dino Risi’s Il sorpasso, coming out next week in a Criterion edition, was an inspiration for Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning Sideways. Being such a fan of the film, which is beloved in Italy but underappreciated here in the U.S., Payne agreed...
Apr 14, 2011 — Performances Roberto Rossellini is not often discussed as a director of actors, and Vittorio De Sica is remembered less as a performer than as a filmmaker. Il generale della Rovere, Rossellini’s searing World War II morality drama from 1959 featuring...
Jan 19, 2010 — A Belgian in New York It was in the 1970s, the first decade of her career, that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created the works that would define her. Informed as much by her brushes with the experimental film scene in...
Essays
Jun 23, 2003 — One of the most unusual features of Italian cinema of the late ’50s and ’60s is the way that it affords us multiple perspectives on the same event, namely the economic boom following the postwar recovery. Where the directors of...