The Casagrandes Movie

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...

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 27, 2010 — This piece first appeared in the 1991 Wim Wenders collection The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversation (Faber and Faber), translated by Michael Hofmann. The story’s about a man who turns up somewhere in the desert out of nowhere and returns...

Jan 19, 2010 — A Belgian in New York It was in the 1970s, the first decade of her career, that Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman created the works that would define her. Informed as much by her brushes with the experimental film scene in...

Dec 14, 2009 — We were amazed at how many e-mails we received from people saying they already had twenty of the titles included in the new box set AK 100: 25 Films by Akira Kurosawa. A big thank-you to all who contacted us...

Dec 1, 2009 — The first words we hear are Sam Cutler’s: “Everybody seems to be ready—are we ready?” We were nowhere near ready for what was to come, there at the bitter end of the sixties. I remember that rainy day so well,...

Dec 1, 2009 — New York artist Jason Polan (known to Criterion fans as the guy behind the “wacky animals” in our monthly newsletters) has been on a mission that’s, to put it mildly, ambitious. The goal of his ongoing drawing project, Every Person...

Oct 22, 2009 — Sheila Heti of the Believer had a chance to talk to Agnès Varda during the Toronto International Film Festival—or rather, a chance to be one of a group of reporters whom Varda, at the festival with her film The Beaches...

Oct 15, 2009 — Whatever Tom Waits is up to—be it music or acting (Down by Law, Short Cuts)—is bound to be interesting, so we can’t wait to see him in the role of a lifetime, as the devil in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,...

Sep 29, 2009 — It’s been six years since Jane Campion last directed a feature film, but her earthy, melancholy new Bright Star, about the romance between poet John Keats and his great love, Fanny Brawne, was well worth the wait. And now that...