The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Aug 16, 2012 — Every ten years since 1952, the world-renowned film magazine Sight & Sound has polled a wide international selection of film critics and directors on what they consider to be the ten greatest works of cinema ever made, and then compiled the results....
Jul 26, 2012 — Sometimes a giggle catches on and produces more giggles. This is evidenced here by twenty-three-year-old Chloë Sevigny, as she barely gets through an interview with David Letterman wherein she is pressed for info on Harmony and an upcoming trip to...
Jun 26, 2012 — Hiroshi Inagaki’s action epic is as responsible for creating Toshiro Mifune’s legendary cinematic persona as the films of Kurosawa.
May 29, 2012 — A watershed film in Bergman’s career, this tale of a woman caught between the past and present is a masterful study in darkness and light.
May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.
Essays
May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...
May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...
Essays
May 8, 2012 — These thoughts on La haine by director Costa-Gavras first appeared in the program book for the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, where the film was screened. La haine is a phenomenon, in that it is an abnormal, a surprising, and...
Essays
Apr 17, 2012 — Maybe it is something to do with the sensual seductiveness of cinema: as new-millennium Americans, we care nothing for Japanese poetry, little for Japanese painting and fiction, and certainly too much for Japanese cartoons, and yet Yasujiro Ozu, the least...
Apr 3, 2012 — Lena Dunham talked to us about a series she just programmed of films that have inspired her.