The Criterion Collection
Nov 8, 2010 — To say that Lars von Trier deals in provocation and controversy is like saying John Ford made westerns: obviously true, but far from giving a measure of the director’s importance. Ever since The Element of Crime polarized critics at Cannes...
Essays
Jun 21, 2010 — A new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. —Michelangelo Antonioni Red Desert came out in 1964, almost twenty years after the end of the war,...
Essays
Nov 19, 2008 — Albert Lamorisse’s principled balancing of objective fact with childish wish fulfillment results in a new, paradoxical genre—the documentary of dreams.
Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.
Mar 17, 2008 — During the Second World War, when Hiroshi Teshigahara was a schoolboy, Japan’s cities—above all his hometown, Tokyo—were mercilessly firebombed. He, and his future associates in countless artistic undertakings, returned to a landscape of bleak ruins. The adolescent Hiroshi was particularly...
Aug 21, 2006 — A key Gen-X comedy about postgraduate angst, Noah Baumbach’s debut feature is an uproarious union of wit and trauma.
Oct 24, 2005 — Jean-Pierre Melville’s great film flirts with macho extremism and slips over into dream and poetry just as it has us most alarmed.
Essays
Jun 7, 1999 — From the moment of its first appearance, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959—where it won the Palme d’Or—it was clear that Black Orpheus was a very special film. Taking the ancient Greek myth of a youth who travels to...
Essays
Mar 30, 1992 — John Schlesinger’s controversial masterpiece made moviegoers squirm with its bold, bleak portrayal of unrequited love, gay and otherwise, and it remains as jolting and thought-provoking as ever.
The Daily
Sep 29, 2022 — An erotically charged “musical fantasia” opens the NYFF’s Currents program.