The Criterion Collection
Dec 25, 2008 — Robert Rossellini’s efforts to put history into images would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television.
Nov 12, 2007 — What is left of Berlin Alexanderplatz, this endless canon of the sublime and the trivial, is thus a perpetuum mobile of the human dance of love and death.
Essays
Jun 25, 2007 — Taking the form of apocalyptic science fiction typical of the Cold War era, Chris Marker’s singular film is simultaneously a philosophical fiction, genre exercise, and treatise on cinematic time.
Oct 16, 2006 — Screenwriter Carlos Cuarón delves into the character played by Claudia Ramírez
Essays
Nov 21, 2005 — Akira Kurosawa’s late masterpiece is a tragedy fed by Shakespeare, Noh, and the samurai epic; it shows human brutality, warfare, and suffering as if from the eye of a dispassionate God.
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.
Essays
May 12, 2001 — Bertrand Tavernier’s adaptation is the story of a saintly madman in a world where the concepts of good and evil have no meaning.
The Daily
Sep 13, 2024 — Will we ever see Ezra Edelman’s Prince documentary? Plus Chantal Akerman, Demi Moore, and the waning of “elevated horror.”
Nov 20, 2008 — David Hudson lives in Berlin and translated screenplays until his blog, GreenCine Daily, swallowed him whole. “It’s awfully daunting to scan a list of over four hundred titles—especially these four hundred–plus titles—and force yourself to pick out ten. I started...
Jul 21, 2026 — Harry Dean Stanton’s Jerry Schue doesn’t get on-screen until a full hour of Ulu Grosbard’s Straight Time (1978) has passed. Unlike Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, Stanton’s character hasn’t been discussed, chewed over, anticipated, and foreshadowed for...