The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 6, 2014 — This humorous magazine piece from 1970 sheds some light on the meaning of the title of Il sorpasso, along with the way Vittorio Gassman comports himself behind the wheel in it.
May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...
Mar 25, 2014 — Silent comedy superstar Harold Lloyd played big dreamers; few were more determined to succeed than the college football player Harold Lamb.
Feb 28, 2014 — The Great Beauty, which is up for best foreign-language film at Sunday’s Academy Awards, feels at times like a glorious throwback to a time when art-house cinema reigned. Feeling nostalgic for that era, when films by the great directors of world...
Essays
Feb 27, 2014 — Roman Polanski’s film is a highly sophisticated adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic novel, in both its faithfulness and its divergences.
Jan 20, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki pays wry tribute to the starving artist in his sad and funny update of Henri Murger’s classic book.
Essays
Jan 7, 2014 — Satyajit Ray was ailing when he made them, but these three works from the great filmmaker’s final years show an artist at the height of his powers.
Essays
Nov 25, 2013 — He massages, he gambles, and he’s great with a blade. Who is this blind swordsman, anyway?
Oct 25, 2013 — "I“m not acting,” stage star Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) tells her bemused director after a violent episode with her ghostly muse in Opening Night. That’s a loaded claim to be making in a movie that so conclusively smudges the line...
Oct 22, 2013 — This delicately creepy Hollywood horror movie lives up to its reputation as a classic of the genre.