The Criterion Collection
Extending from the “kitchen-sink dramas” of the early sixties to contemporary masters like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, the tradition of social realism in British film runs strong.
Essays
Apr 18, 2011 — An Eagle for an Emperor, a Gyrfalcon for a King; a Peregrine for a Prince, a Saker for a Knight, a Merlin for a Lady; a Goshawk for a Yeoman, a Sparrowhawk for a Priest, a Musket...
Features
Feb 28, 2011 — In 1969, director Alexander Mackendrick retired from the film industry and became founding dean of the film school at the newly established California Institute of the Arts. Passionately interested in the pedagogy of cinema (“Film writing and directing cannot be...
Feb 22, 2011 — It wasn’t intended. No one could have predicted it. But Sweet Smell of Success turned out to be a terminus where several movie genres and subgenres converged and curdled, producing a uniquely delicious perfume of everlasting cynicism. Inhale deeply. And...
Sep 28, 2010 — “The past, again and again.” —Major Jack Celliers, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence Nagisa Oshima’s filmmaking career began with the risen sun—or rather, with the promise of a sun soon to rise: Tomorrow’s Sun (1959), a dizzyingly designed faux “coming attraction”...
Anna Karina has written and directed films, taken on prominent stage roles (including in plays directed by Jacques Rivette and Ingmar Bergman), had a successful singing career, and written four novels, but, of course, she is cited most often as...
Sep 21, 2010 — Warrendale: Man of ActionAllan King was one of cinema’s most acute chroniclers of unadorned reality, but the term documentary seems too puny to describe the intense, passionate stories he contrived to fashion from that reality. King’s early nonfiction features are...
Aug 18, 2010 — Before Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus showed up on American and European screens in 1959, what would later be known as the “art film” came in only a few shades of glum: Bergmanesque existentialism, Japanese samurai tragedy, stories of Italian peasant...
May 18, 2010 — Nicolas Roeg’s first solo outing as a director is an astonishing visual poem, by turns violent, innocent, and elegiac.
Interviews
Apr 27, 2010 — From left: Marlon Brando, Maureen Stapleton, Tennessee Williams, and producer Richard Shepherd, on the set of The Fugitive Kind. It was Jules Stein, head and founder of MCA, who plucked Richard Shepherd out of Stanford and made him into a real...