The Criterion Collection
Dec 1, 2006 — We left St-Michel feeling uplifted and took a nice stroll south, past the Closerie des Lilas, the restaurant made famous by Hemingway, and through the Luxembourg gardens, where a film crew was laying dolly tracks and fitting counterweights on a...
Nov 30, 2006 — We've been all over the city in the past couple of days, lugging around the fourteen-pound Janus box in a prototype Janus tote, feeling a little like traveling salesmen, but it's okay, because Paris is just so beautiful, even on...
Nov 16, 2006 — At the Museum of the Moving Image tonight, Peter Cowie is presenting his new book on Louise Brooks, Lulu Forever, and they are digitally screening our new Pandora's Box restoration with the Gillian Anderson score. I don’t think I’ve ever...
Aug 18, 2003 — One of the Swedish director’s most representative works, this drama’s portentousness, banked intensity, and recondite symbolism come near to embodying the popular stereotype of the Bergmanesque.
Essays
Sep 8, 1998 — In David Lean’s Summertime, in which Rossano Brazzi seduces Katharine Hepburn—an aging, repressed Ohio “working girl” on vacation in Venice—the Continental lover reached his pinnacle and approached his end. In the next decade, he would be embodied by Marcello Mastroianni,...
Sep 22, 1997 — The English Patient was the ?rst book of Michael Ondaatje’s I had read, and I thought it was remarkable.Two weeks after ?nishing the novel, Anthony Minghella telephoned from London and asked, “How could we do this as a movie?” Being...
Sep 18, 1995 — The global problem of domestic violence destroys families and, in a broader context, locks entire societies into a pathology of pain, distrust, and self-hate. When the basic building blocks of any society—the bonds between mother, father, children—are so grossly violated,...
May 25, 1992 — If Max Ophuls hadn’t cooled his heels in Hollywood to flee the Nazis, his name might have conjured only the most unintelligible of foreign cinema—vague and inaccessible to the average American filmgoer. But in 1948 Ophuls was given an opportunity...
The legendary cinematographer praises the way Néstor Almendros captured light in Days of Heaven, talks about his experience working with Elaine May on Mikey and Nicky, and shares what makes No Bears such an engrossing film.