The Criterion Collection
Jul 28, 2014 — Jacques Demy’s first full-fledged storybook fantasy challenges and subverts traditional fairy-tale norms.
May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...
Dec 16, 2013 — A melodramatic investigation of family and class, Kim Ki-young’s film exorcises some demons of 1960s South Korean society.
Dec 10, 2013 — Djibril Diop Mambety’s Senegalese masterwork is remarkable for both its technical audacity and its postcolonialist expressionism.
Essays
Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?
Oct 21, 2013 — As a film star, John Cassavetes embodied the kinetic, wild-eyed, insanely grinning villain. He seemed born to the role, with his volatile energy and dynamic outbursts, luminous yet curiously deadened eyes, wide-gaping mouth (David Thomson has likened it to a...
Sep 26, 2013 — Roberto Rossellini officially left neorealism behind with his modern masterpiece, an intimate tale of marriage on the rocks.
Short Takes
Sep 17, 2013 — The author sheds some light on the fascinating life of the American scriptwriter behind Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan.
Aug 20, 2013 — Satyajit Ray’s delicate masterpiece about forbidden love in the late nineteenth century is lovingly adapted from a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore.
Jun 20, 2013 — The prophetic voice of H. G. Wells resonates throughout this singularly ambitious, spectacularly designed vision.