The Criterion Collection
Sneak Peeks
Oct 22, 2014 — In a fascinating 1963 audio interview featured on our new release of La dolce vita, actor Marcello Mastroianni talks to film historian Gideon Bachmann about how he met Federico Fellini and was cast in La dolce vita. This disarmingly personal excerpt...
Oct 21, 2014 — Federico Fellini’s frantic tragicomedy is such a classic it risks being underestimated.
Sneak Peeks
Jan 28, 2014 — Among the delights of Aki Kaurismäki’s La vie de bohème are the guest appearances by François Truffaut alter ego Jean-Pierre Léaud and the two-fisted American auteur Samuel Fuller. The former plays an eccentric collector who takes an interest in the...
Short Takes
Jan 24, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki first read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème in 1976. The highly influential 1851 book—an episodic novel about a group of starving artists that also inspired Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème—captured the Finnish filmmaker’s imagination and,...
Essays
Oct 28, 2013 — A husband and wife in 1960s Milan are isolated from each other and displaced in the modern world in Michelangelo Antonioni’s tale of love and space.
Sneak Peeks
Sep 13, 2013 — Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 La Cage aux Folles is not only an entertaining farce but also a landmark, for the way it opened many viewers’ eyes to both drag culture and same-sex relationships. To find out more about the film’s sexual...
Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.
Sneak Peeks
Aug 15, 2012 — The idea that Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have an uncanny ability to get right on top of the action in a scene without their camera’s ever feeling intrusive—to actors or viewers—is a common refrain in discussions of the Belgian directors’...
Short Takes
Aug 2, 2012 — This week we lost one of the great artists of the past century, Chris Marker. Though best known for his 1962 La Jetée, a science-fiction epic in miniature told through black-and-white still photographs, and his 1983 Sans Soleil, a personal...
Visual Analysis
Jun 21, 2012 — Chris Marker’s La Jetée is the kind of film that haunts the brain. This quality is attributable not only to its unforgettable postapocalyptic imagery but also to its soundscapes, as spare as they are ravishing and mysterious. In this new...