The Criterion Collection
Sneak Peeks
Dec 6, 2012 — Today, Brazil is a widely, feverishly loved film, but once upon a time it had its share of detractors—specifically, those who financed it and released it in the U.S. In the documentary The Battle of “Brazil,” critic Jack Mathews charts...
Essays
Nov 6, 2012 — When Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon (1950), he was a forty-year-old director working near the beginning of a career that would last fifty years, produce some of the greatest films ever made, and exert a tremendous and lasting influence on filmmaking...
Nov 5, 2012 — The following originally appeared as the afterword to the 2003 New American Library edition of the novel Rosemary’s Baby. Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror appears, I was struck...
In Theaters
Oct 11, 2012 — Repertory PicksBAMcinématek in Brooklyn is looking back to the nineties for a celebration of the period in American and British independent cinema when a wide array of gay and lesbian artists built their own movement. The series Born in Flames:...
Short Takes
Oct 4, 2012 — Louis Malle is remembered primarily as a fiction filmmaker, but he had a parallel career as a documentarian. In fact, he got his start in nonfiction: when he was just twenty-three years old, Malle was given the opportunity to collaborate...
Short Takes
Sep 13, 2012 — Horror fans might assume that director Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies wrote the book on cursed bibles of the damned. But years earlier, in 1967, The Equinox . . . A Journey into the Supernatural, one of the films in this week’s...
Sep 7, 2012 — Did You See This? • We are very impressed. • Talking cult cinema with Eating Raoul’s Mary Woronov • Some fantastic out-of-the-way theaters, from the underground to the grandiose • Digging deeper with Cronenberg • Mailer’s unorthodox Hamptons excursion •...
Sneak Peeks
Aug 15, 2012 — The idea that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have an uncanny ability to get right on top of the action in a scene without their camera’s ever feeling intrusive—to actors or viewers—is a common refrain in discussions of the Belgian directors’...
Essays
Jul 24, 2012 — Whit Stillman’s wry comedy about Upper East Siders looked like a perverse bit of daring in 1990; today it seems like an artifact from an earlier century.