This Much I Know to Be True

Feb 20, 2011 — Melodrama has a bad reputation because it has been abandoned to schematic and conventional interpretation. —Luchino ViscontiSenso, Luchino Visconti’s extraordinarily lush 1954 movie, was never truly released in America. Even though an American star, Farley Granger, and a European star,...

Oct 29, 2009 — In the spirit of the season, we asked a select coven of horror mavens (including a couple of our own) to write about their favorite Criterion scarefests. Chuck StephensEquinox: The Eyebrows of Mr. Asmodeus There are myriad ways into Equinox,...

Dec 3, 2008 — Gliding on silvery reels of steel, and tricked out with Lars von Trier’s panoply of visual effects, the film ravishes with its elaborately storyboarded tunnel vision.

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Aug 14, 2006 — “Some people think rohmer is in league with the devil,” wrote cinematographer Nestor Almendros in his book of autobiographical reflections on the cinema, A Man with a Camera. He was describing his working experience on My Night at Maud’s (1969)....

Jul 11, 2005 — The trickily variant sensibilities of the three daydreams and their long duration are what mark Unfaithfully Yours as a stray modernist object.

Sep 18, 2000 — Drenched in mud and rain, Lars von Trier’s breakthrough film inhabits a true twilight zone, bereft of heroes and integrity.

May 19, 2026 — “Last night, I was in the Kingdom of Shadows,” proclaimed Maxim Gorky, writing about an 1896 projection of films by Auguste and Louis Lumière in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. “Suddenly a strange flicker passes through the screen and...

Oct 2, 2007 — Longtime Criterionites remember the days when we were a part of the Voyager Company. Voyager had a long history of innovations, hooking up laserdisc players to early Macintosh computers to explore the world’s museums or inventing interactive software to explore...

Dec 18, 2000 — Elegant humor cloaks despair in Luis Buñuel’s masterwork, wherein greedy characters flee their toxic lives and find refuge in the loneliness of dreams.