The Criterion Collection
Dec 16, 2008 — There has never been another movie quite like Carol Reed and Graham Greene’s masterpiece—a borderline counterintuitive combination of disparate elements that somehow come together as if they had been destined to do so.
Oct 20, 2008 — Though he had been directing films since the silent era, Kenji Mizoguchi didn’t become an international sensation until after the Second World War, benefiting from a new fascination with Japan’s cinematic output.
Sep 22, 2008 — With their rotating casts of sourpuss Finns and their stringent compositions, Aki Kaurismäki’s films would seem the least likely candidates for laughs, yet his black-comic precision has made him one of the most warmly embraced filmmakers on the international art-house...
Essays
Jul 14, 2008 — Linguistic cosmopolitanism in the Babel-like world of commerce and culture is one of Jacques Tati’s several satirical targets.
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.
Oct 15, 2007 — One of Spain’s most acclaimed and prolific directors, Carlos Saura emerged as an artist in the late 1950s under Franco’s dictatorship and immediately made his mark as an incisive, if necessarily allusive, social and political commentator.
Essays
Aug 20, 2007 — Luis Buñuel’s only work to be devoted entirely to Catholic dogma itself examines the six primary mysteries of the faith and the objections (or heresies, depending on your view) they have inspired.
Jul 9, 2007 — Hiroshi Teshigahara’s late work is a masterful amalgam of high international modernism and traditional Japanese fine arts.
Jun 18, 2007 — Dušan Makavejev’s masterpiece explores sexual freedoms and their perils in both New York and Belgrade, using each city and set of practices and problems to help define the other.
Feb 19, 2007 — A powerful document of anti-Nazi propaganda, Powell and Pressburger’s war drama consolidated their partnership and showed a way forward for British cinema.