The Criterion Collection
Essays
Mar 29, 2011 — As the only film of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera brought to the screen with the participation of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, Victor Schertzinger’s 1939 Technicolor The Mikado is a unique specimen; however one rates it, there is nothing with...
Essays
Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...
Feb 8, 2011 — Federico Fellini was born and brought up in Rimini, Italy, a small seaside town in the province of Emilia-Romagna. Amarcord is a neologism he contrived, which comes closest to the Emiliano-Romagnolo dialect phrase mi ricordo (I remember). Fellini, a great...
Jan 11, 2011 — Given the scarcity of information available in the sixties, director Byron Haskin did a remarkable job of representing some of the conditions on our nearest planetary neighbor, nearly a year before the first close-up views of the real Martian surface.
Jan 11, 2011 — His most personal film as well as the final one to deal with the German occupation of France, Jean-Pierre Melville’s thriller showcases human consciousness grappling with mortality.
Essays
Jan 11, 2011 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s film Army of Shadows (1969) gives a dramatic account of the extreme dangers faced by the French who resisted the German occupation of 1940–1944. The time of the story is unspecified, but it is probably 1943, late enough...
Dec 7, 2010 — In 1981, it seemed to me that a new era of fantastic cinema was upon us.
Oct 12, 2010 — Ingmar Bergman’s Ansiktet (1958)—the title literally translates as The Face, though in North America it was released as The Magician—is arguably one of his most underrated achievements. Its undeservedly lowly standing may perhaps be attributed to its chronological position in...
Tech Corner
Aug 12, 2010 — One of the most challenging aspects of our work is to get accurate color for films when there are no filmmakers to consult with. This is especially true of films from the fifties and sixties, for which cinematographers, directors, editors,...
Jul 27, 2010 — Americans got The Secret of the Grain. In France, they got La graine et le mulet (The Grain and the Mullet)—basically, “Couscous and Fish.” Depending on whose table you eat dinner at, the French title can seem as elemental as...