The Criterion Collection
Nov 13, 2012 — Rejecting the orientalism of other adaptations, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s take on the classic tales is humane and erotic.
May 23, 2012 — Iranian master director Abbas Kiarostami voyaged to Italy to make a film that questions love, relationships, and Western art cinema.
Feb 7, 2012 — La Jetée (1963) and Sans Soleil (1983), made a tidy twenty years apart, are the twin peaks of Chris Marker’s creative achievements and his best-loved and most widely seen films. But who is Chris Marker? Writer, photographer, editor, filmmaker, videographer,...
Essays
Nov 15, 2011 — The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy corresponds to the...
Nov 25, 2010 — Five Easy Pieces is not a statement about America but a closely observed report. Or, perhaps, a confession.
Sep 17, 2009 — Le jour se lève was Marcel Carné’s fourth collaboration with screenwriter and poet Jacques Prévert and their third entry in the poetic realism cinema movement, following their vanguard Drôle de drame and Port of Shadows. Both of those films were...
Essays
Jul 21, 2008 — A dreamy alternative to the standard notion of horror, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s phantasmal film reimagined the figure of the vampire.
Feb 19, 2007 — For a director whose vision is so frequently called pessimistic, Mikio Naruse’s drama exhibits a lightness of touch, deft and coolly understated, like its cocktail jazz score.
Essays
Apr 25, 2005 — Andrzej Wajda’s first feature film marks the beginning of the Polish School, the paradigm of Polish cinema that arose from the political and cultural thaw of the mid-1950s.
May 9, 2004 — With his vibrant chronicle of an Oedipal revolt, Volker Schlöndorff captures the source novel’s singular recreation of the German past.