The Criterion Collection
Sep 7, 2011 — The Dryden Theatre—the exhibition space of the renowned George Eastman House film archive in Rochester, New York—is celebrating its sixtieth anniversary this year. And its recently hired programmer: Lori Donnelly, is thrilled to be there for the occasion. “It’s a...
Jan 21, 2008 — Married thrice and divorced from all of his wives at a time in Western culture when such marital fluctuation was rare, the playwright August Strindberg undoubtedly used his own dramatic life as a sourcebook.
Sep 3, 2007 — I’m on a flight back from the Telluride Film Festival and two and a half great days in the mountains. Telluride has been an important festival for Criterion and Janus for years. It’s a great opportunity to mingle with filmmakers...
Essays
Aug 20, 2007 — David Mamet’s debut film was a welcome throwback to the primacy of character and careful story construction, at a time when narrative intricacy was in short supply on American movie screens.
Aug 13, 2007 — Samuel Fuller knew how to handle a gun from his army days, and this experience colored all of his filmmaking, which he began at the age of thirty-six.
Mar 19, 2007 — In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book,...
Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s coming-of-age drama offers an unusually full and individualized characterization of a boy whose yearnings, sensitivities, and fantasies outstrip his personality.
Dec 5, 2005 — If there is a skeleton key to François Truffaut’s oeuvre, it is this film, in which all of his assorted gifts and preoccupations are in play and meshed into a uniquely idiosyncratic whole.
Jan 10, 2005 — Seijun Suzuki made a breakthrough with his second feature, a yakuza thriller full of devil-may-care assurance and try-anything imagination.
Dec 6, 2004 — In his first freestanding biblical epic, Cecil B. DeMille recognized and revered a profound quality in the American soul—its ability to leap over every contradiction through an invincible sense of its own righteousness.