The Criterion Collection
Oct 15, 2015 — Arnaud Desplechin stopped by for a visit and dispensed a few of his gems of wisdom.
Apr 19, 1994 — Rivaled only by Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst as Germany’s greatest director of the silent age, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was a tireless formal innovator exhilaratingly difficult to pin down. If his 1922 horror epic Nosferatu represented an apex of...
May 2, 2019 — When I first saw My Brilliant Career, when it was released in New York in 1980, I was ignorant of director “Gill” Armstrong. I assumed she was a man, because at the time I could count the female directors I...
Essays
Dec 14, 2016 — Pseudodocumentary collides with pure fantasy in Federico Fellini’s intricately layered portrait of his adopted home.
Jul 15, 2014 — Ihave an unusually easy way of remembering when I first became fascinated by Robert Bresson’s films. Pickpocket (1959) was the first one I saw, at the old Orson Welles theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in my late teens; it was also...
Oct 18, 2009 — So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...
Essays
Jan 19, 2009 — In 1929, a fifty-one-year-old Congregationalist pastor named Lloyd C. Douglas published his first novel. It was a ramshackle sort of book, at its core an undiluted Christian sermon on the life-transforming power of charitable works. But it was a sermon...
Sep 24, 2018 — This faithful screen adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s legendary play explores a wide range of perspectives on working-class black life, and over the years has inspired reactions just as diverse.
Nov 2, 2021 — Federico Fellini’s earliest masterpiece is a story of despair and optimism, cruelty and salvation, that occasioned the director’s ascent to stardom.
Essays
May 13, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s visually majestic, emotionally charged western finds its drama in the decency of its characters.