The Criterion Collection
Essays
Feb 24, 2016 — Fifty years after its initial release, Antonio Pietrangeli’s I Knew Her Well is only now emerging as a dazzling peer of the classics of 1960s Italian cinema.
Feb 24, 2016 — Mike Nichols’s American classic The Graduate launched the career of Dustin Hoffman and made him one of the most sought-after actors of his generation. Up to that point, Hoffman had mainly been performing off-Broadway and taking small roles in film...
Feb 23, 2016 — Without any overt topical references, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate captured the zeitgeist of the 1960s and the dawning countercultural revolution.
Short Takes
Feb 19, 2016 — For over half a century, Mike Nichols’s varied talents and singular voice made him a cultural icon. From his early days in sketch comedy with Elaine May to his career as a theater director and his prolific output as a...
Feb 18, 2016 — The Kid marked Charlie Chaplin’s wholehearted embrace of sentiment, which he intertwined with the slapstick he was known for to enrich his Tramp character and carry the narrative of feature-length directorial debut.
Short Takes
Feb 17, 2016 — Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 masterpiece of silent cinema, The Kid, is now available on Blu-ray and DVD. In this film, his feature-length directorial debut, Chaplin stars as his already iconic Tramp character alongside a young Jackie Coogan, who plays the orphan...
Short Takes
Feb 17, 2016 — It’s been nearly fifty years since the original release of Nagisa Oshima’s Death by Hanging, yet the 1968 feature remains as viscerally powerful as ever. Oshima, one of the Japanese New Wave’s most prominent directors, made the film as a...
Feb 16, 2016 — In Death by Hanging, Nagisa Oshima spins a complex aesthetic web around his documentary-like structure, packing detail, history, politics, and emotion into his surrealist inquiry into capital punishment.
Visual Analysis
Feb 10, 2016 — Regular Criterion Collection contributor :: kogonada explores the innovative cinematic lexicon Godard developed in the fifteen features he made between 1960 and 1967.
Feb 9, 2016 — Jan Troell’s narration of one Swedish couple’s arduous journey to America portrays the migratory quality of marriage—of “finding that you think of this person who is not you, or this place that is not the land of your birth, as...