The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jul 19, 2004 — Marcel Carné's third feature is as epochal as any film made in France in the 1930s, exemplifying the style known as “poetic realism.”
Essays
Jun 21, 2004 — Nouvelle vague euphoria was at its height when Jean-Luc Godard made his enormously clever third feature.
Essays
May 24, 2004 — By piling on naturalistic details to keep the heat constantly in our minds, Akira Kurosawa creates a visual and behavioral excess that highlights the fixation of his hero on retrieving his stolen gun.
May 24, 2004 — Stray Dog, the ninth film directed by Akira Kurosawa, is a detective story that’s also meant to function as a commentary on the desperate social conditions of postwar Japan: a kind of neorealist cop movie.
Essays
May 17, 2004 — Banned by the Third Reich before it was even released, Fritz Lang’s denunciation of Nazi Germany is a compellingly contemporary image of terrorism in an age of universal conspiracy and advanced technology.
Mar 13, 2004 — With uncharacteristic warmth and affection for human frailty, Ingmar Bergman raises the question of how love can possibly last forever.
Essays
Feb 23, 2004 — With his drama about a Sicilian bandit, Francesco Rosi developed the style and method that would make him, during the sixties and seventies, the greatest political filmmaker of his time.
Feb 16, 2004 — In this quintessential noir, Samuel Fuller breaks with the Red Scare formula of his contemporaries by contrasting the faceless evil of Communism against the peccadilloes of the workaday American crook.