The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Sep 2, 2010 — This year’s ATP New York—the stateside iteration of the British independent music festival All Tomorrow’s Parties—at the Catskills resort hotel Kutsher’s Country Club, is just a day away. Starting September 3, ATP will begin its annual weekend blowout (this year...
These ingenious early works by such masters as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Yasujiro Ozu lay the foundations for screen comedy.
Jul 26, 2010 — The Story of a Cheat: Breaking the Rules While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific...
These films underline both our need to ask eternal questions and the paradoxical power of a visual medium to capture the intangible.
Production Notes
Jun 22, 2010 — Sitting on a hard drive here in the office is the unedited footage of an interview we shot here with Peter Brunette on April 26, for an upcoming release of Senso. The release had been delayed, but I told Peter that since...
Short Takes
Jun 18, 2010 — Some of the greatest science fiction films of all time were made in the 1970s—and we’re not talking about Star Wars. This weekend, the Harvard Film Archive begins a ten-day tribute to some of cinema’s brainiest and best otherworldly visions,...
Feb 10, 2010 — Revanche begins with a reflection of trees in a lake at twilight. They’re seen upside down—an image of nature reversed—yet the earth is eerily calm. This almost otherworldly illusion arouses a viewer’s awareness of perspective, which is then disturbed by...
Short Takes
Feb 5, 2010 — Robert Altman: The Oral Biography (Knopf) begins with an epigram that pretty well sums up Altman’s attitude toward “truth” and “realism” in cinema and life. “I don’t think anybody remembers the truth, the facts,” the great filmmaker said. “You remember...
Jan 26, 2010 — Today, most people’s knowledge of George Bernard Shaw doesn’t extend much further than his classic comedy Pygmalion. But the legendary playwright and theater critic (1856–1950) wrote more than sixty plays. In February, we at the Criterion Collection will do our part...
Jan 12, 2010 — 8½: a bizarre and puzzling title, but one precisely appropriate for this film, which announces in its first frame that modernism has reached the cinema. If the mark of modernism in art is self-reference, 8½ surely goes beyond any predecessor...