The Criterion Collection
Features
Jul 17, 2014 — When I was in high school in the late ’70s, one of my closest pals was a semiprofessional magician. A top-flight pianist as well, Charles was making some tidy sums as an entertainer in restaurants and clubs around North Jersey...
Jun 27, 2014 — The American war in Vietnam was officially divided into two halves: the military war and “the other war: the war to win the hearts and minds of the people,” which gives Peter Davis’s 1974 documentary its title. Whereas the aim...
May 19, 2014 — As in his other films, the world of Abbas Kiarostami’s latest is one of simulation, not-quite-realness, and unexpected tenderness.
Feb 18, 2014 — The immediacy of an ongoing war electrifies Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful second Hollywood feature.
Essays
Feb 4, 2014 — When François Truffaut was a twenty-three-year-old film critic, in 1955, he read an autobiographical first novel by a seventy-four-year-old writer, Henri-Pierre Roché. “The book overwhelmed me,” he later recalled, “and I wrote: If I ever succeed in making films, I...
Essays
Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?
Oct 25, 2013 — "I“m not acting,” stage star Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) tells her bemused director after a violent episode with her ghostly muse in Opening Night. That’s a loaded claim to be making in a movie that so conclusively smudges the line...
Oct 22, 2013 — This delicately creepy Hollywood horror movie lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre.
Features
Sep 4, 2013 — Only Ernst Lubitsch got the great comedian to be as funny on the big screen as he was on the radio.
May 14, 2013 — Delmer Daves’s classic western is psychologically probing, magnificently shot, and fascinatingly ambiguous.