The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 21, 2008 — A dreamy alternative to the standard notion of horror, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s phantasmal film reimagined the figure of the vampire.
Essays
Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.
Jun 23, 2008 — Five years of increasingly horrific news from the former Yugoslavia made Milcho Manchevski’s searing yet lyrical film timely to a degree that few filmmakers have ever achieved.
May 12, 2008 — Today it may be hard to understand the shock waves that Louis Malle’s romantic drama created with its “frank” depiction of a woman’s sexual pleasure, but in the context of late-1950s France, it was a bombshell.
Sep 3, 2007 — It came from nowhere, it’s always been here—or so Stranger Than Paradise might seem.Jim Jarmusch had completed his first feature, Permanent Vacation, in 1980 and spent the next four years working on his second. Screened a few times as a...
Dec 5, 2005 — René Clément’s masterpiece is dedicated to the radical Freudian proposal that living matter seeks the comfort of oblivion.
Jul 11, 2005 — The trickily variant sensibilities of the three daydreams and their long duration are what mark Unfaithfully Yours as a stray modernist object.
Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.
Essays
Jun 21, 2004 — Nouvelle vague euphoria was at its height when Jean-Luc Godard made his enormously clever third feature.
Essays
Apr 28, 2003 — Federico Fellini both identifies with and satirizes the provinciality that forms his romantic comedy's central subject.