The Criterion Collection
May 1, 2015 — In his first feature, Jean-Pierre Melville found subtly radical ways to adapt Vercors's underground French novel about quiet resistance against the German occupation.
Essays
Mar 30, 2015 — The astonishing intimacy and scope of this remarkable, aesthetically captivating epic ushered in a new era of narrative documentary filmmaking.
Mar 9, 2015 — François Truffaut’s adultery drama is at times corrosively funny and at others frighteningly tense, but it’s always incisive and humane.
Feb 26, 2015 — The threat of death hangs over Watership Down, Martin Rosen’s wise and uncompromising animated adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic novel about rabbits on a survival mission.
Features
Nov 28, 2014 — It Happened One Night is part of a long tradition of American comedies on the move.
Aug 18, 2014 — The filmmaker and critic discuss the pleasures and provocations of the Spanish auteur’s work.
Essays
May 6, 2014 — This humorous magazine piece from 1970 sheds some light on the meaning of the title of Il sorpasso, along with the way Vittorio Gassman comports himself behind the wheel in it.
May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...
Apr 22, 2014 — Carl Theodor Dreyer’s spare and modern visual style perfectly complements this comic and soulful domestic comeuppance story.
Apr 14, 2014 — Lars von Trier brought his brand of provocation to his widest audience yet with this inquiry into faith and human goodness.