The Criterion Collection
Jun 20, 2017 — At the dawn of sound cinema, French theater titan Marcel Pagnol immortalized his epic vision of his native Provence in three exquisite humanist dramas.
May 24, 2017 — The Cannes Film Festival always kicks up a flurry of announcements of projects in the works. Now that we’ve just passed the halfway mark, let’s have a look at some of the more interesting titles we’ve heard about so far.“Robert...
Jun 28, 2016 — When Stanley Kubrick bought the motion picture rights to the 1958 thriller Red Alert, by the retired Royal Air Force navigator Peter George, he meant to direct an action film about a nuclear war triggered by a solitary madman. Some...
Mar 12, 2013 — Working in America, German master Fritz Lang contributed to the anti-Nazi effort with this nightmarish, surreal tale of espionage.
Nov 3, 2009 — If ever there was a European art film that could be all things to all people, it’s Wim Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece.
Essays
Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...
May 26, 2008 — Though producer Alexander Korda’s adventure movie forms part of a continued tradition of representing the East by purposefully occluding the reality of it, it celebrates the Arabian fantasy as a site of childlike wonder.
Essays
Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s subversion of the samurai movie possesses the same gritty, stark realism with regard to imagery and body count, yet the tone is decidedly comic.
Oct 24, 2005 — Mirroring changes in awareness, politics, and lifestyle occurring across the globe, the chanbara (or Japanese swordplay film) underwent a significant metamorphosis in the early 1960s, acquiring a decidedly more radical spirit. Seemingly without warning, groundbreaking cinematic styles from beyond the...
Essays
Oct 24, 2005 — Kihachi Okamoto’s dynamic, intricately madcap movie is a multitoned send-up of samurai film lore.