The Criterion Collection
Jan 22, 2019 — Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside...
Apr 16, 2018 — Just before the release of her new film You Were Never Really Here, Lynne Ramsay spoke with us about her early moviegoing life in Glasgow, the version of herself that emerges on set, and the mind-expanding power of chess.
Features
Dec 20, 2017 — In her latest column, critic Imogen Sara Smith explains how cinematographer Henri Decaë brought a risk-taking spirit and seductive allure to some of the most iconic French crime films.
Sneak Peeks
Nov 16, 2017 — One of the masters of the French crime film explains how the film-noir form serves as a convenient vehicle for exploring such elemental human themes as freedom and betrayal.
Features
Sep 17, 2017 — Matteo Garrone’s gritty portrait of the Neapolitan Mafia draws on a lineage of Italian crime films dating back to Francesco Rosi’s trailblazing Salvatore Giuliano.
The Daily
Jul 5, 2017 — Robert Pattinson is on the cover of the new issue of Film Comment and online we find a brief excerpt from editor Nicolas Rapold’s interview with the star of Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time.Amy Taubin describes what, for her,...
Oct 24, 2013 — In John Cassavetes’s personal cinema, the director was always trying to break away from the formulas of Hollywood narrative, in order to uncover some fugitive truth about the way people behave. At the same time, he took seriously his responsibilities...
Dec 13, 2011 — Seijun Suzuki’s delirious, absurdist deconstruction of the crime genre is the strangest film the director made at Nikkatsu, Japan’s oldest film company.
Essays
May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...
Short Takes
Apr 6, 2010 — In “the cinema of flourishes”—as scholar David Bordwell once memorably characterized the long and grand tradition of Japanese filmmaking—few flourish makers have flown so high as Takeo Kimura, longtime Seijun Suzuki collaborator and art director extraordinaire, who died recently at...