The Criterion Collection
Oct 18, 2009 — So many worlds stream in from every direction in Monsoon Wedding that it comes to seem as if the whole globe is converging on a single family home in New Delhi: relatives from Houston, from Australia, from Dubai (“Muscat, actually”);...
Oct 15, 2009 — Our favorite Manitoban, Guy Maddin, cheerfully grim chronicler of storybook psychosexuality and charmingly modest self-mythologizer, is in Paris now for a special event. Though just fifty-three and very much still working, the filmmaker is the subject of a complete career...
Production Notes
Oct 15, 2009 — Full-size sidewalks aren’t very common in outer Tokyo, particularly in the many small residential neighborhoods that surround the city for miles. Likely a holdover from when there weren’t as many cars around and people walked in the roads alongside carts...
Oct 12, 2009 — Man is Not a Bird: Flying Away The term “independent cinema” has lost its punch in recent years, from overuse and misapplication. One need only look to the films of Dušan Makavejev for a reminder of its true meaning. This...
Interviews
Sep 30, 2009 — Agnès Varda’s 1962 New Wave masterpiece Cléo from 5 to 7 has gotten a dramatic reinterpretation from Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar, stage directors and founders of New York’s Big Dance Theater. Comme Toujours Here I Stand—which premiered in April...
Sep 29, 2009 — It’s been six years since Jane Campion last directed a feature film, but her earthy, melancholy new Bright Star, about the romance between poet John Keats and his great love, Fanny Brawne, was well worth the wait. And now that...
Short Takes
Sep 28, 2009 — In Stockholm, an auction of personal belongings from the estate of the great director Ingmar Bergman has just ended. The items ranged from parts of his daily life—his writing desk and wastepaper basket—to the chess set used in The Seventh...
Sep 22, 2009 — Abandoning the cinematic conventions and references that informed his previous works, Jean-Luc Godard’s explosive crime drama reaches new heights of spontaneity and lightning invention.
Sep 22, 2009 — A new era in popular music deserves a new era in filmmaking—that’s the basis of the perfect, fortuitous match-up between rock and cinema in D.A. Pennebaker’s concert film.
Sep 22, 2009 — Something very heavy happened at Monterey last weekend. Those very odd three days began in Friday’s cool gray air as the first of the crowd began to circle through the booths of the fairground. The only word for it then...