The Criterion Collection
May 5, 2009 — Irecently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given...
Apr 30, 2009 — The concept of “obscenity” is tested when we dare to look at something that we desire to see but have forbidden ourselves to look at. When we feel that everything has been revealed, “obscenity” disappears and there is a certain...
Apr 23, 2009 — These profiles of the real-life Sada Abé and the actress who portrayed her in Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses first appeared in Donald Richie’s 1987 book Different People: Pictures of Some Japanese, and can also be found...
Apr 20, 2009 — The French scientist-educator-filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s groundbreaking work consistently revealed not only a commitment to informed science and effective communication but to the creative expression of ideas.
Apr 19, 2009 — “Why Sam Fuller?” a new essay by Tag Gallagher, in the latest issue of Senses of Cinema, asks. Aficionados might wonder, why even ask? But perhaps they forget that the two-fisted termite art of this now much-heralded genre filmmaker was...
Essays
Mar 30, 2009 — Among the great Polish filmmakers—Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Agnieszka Holland, Roman Polanski—Andrzej Wajda stands out as the one most concerned with national identity and memory.
Mar 27, 2009 — Thanks to IFC Daily’s David Hudson for tipping us off to a couple of top-notch articles this week marking the fiftieth anniversary of the French New Wave. That’s right, it was fifty years ago, in May to be precise, that...
Jan 22, 2009 — Last fall the Criterion Collection and Janus Films joined forces to acquire a first-run film for theatrical distribution—a rare move for two companies best known for handling the classics of cinema history. Revanche, both an existential thriller and a quiet,...
Jan 13, 2009 — This week marks the long-anticipated release of Roberto Rossellini’s beloved The Taking of Power by Louis XIV, the crowning achievement of the filmmaker’s remarkable end-of-career endeavor to capture the history of human knowledge in a series of provocatively minimalist television films...
Jan 11, 2009 — What happened when Bernardo Bertolucci went to see Stop Making Sense in Florence? Well, as he confessed to director Jonathan Demme, he not only loved the film but was also stunned by (and even a little envious of) the response...