The Criterion Collection
Jul 14, 2009 — Tough title to live up to. The lofty three-word phrase Al Reinert chose for his 1989 documentary on the Apollo space program comes from the plaque the first men on the moon, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, left there in...
Jul 10, 2009 — The final, resolutely unfashionable film from grand old master Carl Theodor Dreyer, Gertrud was met with dismissal in 1964 and continues to be somewhat overlooked even today. But this week, Jonathan Rosenbaum reminds us of its unique beauties and unconventional...
Features
Jul 8, 2009 — I’ll never forget that first step on the moon. I was at the home of a high school classmate in Fort Worth on the evening of July 20, 1969. The Eagle had landed that afternoon, and we’d been waiting for...
Jul 3, 2009 — It’s often said that there’s never been a movie quite like Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. But in paying tribute to this French New Wave landmark on the occasion of its release in Criterion DVD and Blu-ray editions, some...
Jul 1, 2009 — Almost thirty years have gone by since Wallace Shawn and André Gregory sat down for dinner on the Upper West Side and talked (and talked) their way into film history. So for our new special edition DVD of that encounter,...
Jun 30, 2009 — Quick, how many directors can you name who have pulled a 320-ton steamship over a mountain? Yes, that megalomaniacal masterpiece Fitzcarraldo is just further proof that Werner Herzog stands alone in the annals of filmmaking. And though this tireless artist...
Jun 25, 2009 — Robert Koehler takes a long “second look” at Death of a Cyclist in the summer 2009 issue of Cineaste, sizing up Juan Antonio Bardem’s 1955 political melodrama in terms of Spain’s national identity and the legacy of neorealism. Check it...
Jun 23, 2009 — The summer 2009 issue of Film Quarterly (now in its fiftieth year!) is out, and in it renowned professor and film theorist Laura Mulvey presents a close reading of Max Ophuls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . ,...
Jun 22, 2009 — So much critical ink has been shed over Last Year at Marienbad that one might wonder if the flood of commentary, once receded, would take the film along with it. Alain Resnais’ second feature has been lavishly praised and royally...
Jun 19, 2009 — Just this week a man, armed with a handgun, attempted to rob what is almost certainly (based on local accounts and a little detective work on our part) the very same Dedham, Massachusetts, bank that was the setting of the...