The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Dec 8, 2010 — Over at his New Yorker blog, The Front Row, Richard Brody dives back into Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning, the Criterion edition of which is his DVD pick of the week. Over a lovingly assembled montage of clips from...
Dec 7, 2010 — Guillermo del Toro understands the power of fairy tales. Not the prettified romances of Charles Perrault, who tamed the Brothers Grimm for French drawing rooms, or the charming animal fables of Aesop, or the reassuring moral lessons Disney made of...
Essays
Nov 16, 2010 — To make a silent film in 1931, four years after The Jazz Singer, was to buck the trend in a film industry rapidly divesting itself of silence. To make another in 1936, nearly a decade after the advent of sound,...
Anna Karina has written and directed films, taken on prominent stage roles (including in plays directed by Jacques Rivette and Ingmar Bergman), had a successful singing career, and written four novels, but, of course, she is cited most often as...
In a national cinema dominated by behemoth Hollywood studios, independently produced films have always made for refreshing alternatives.
Short Takes
Aug 11, 2010 — When Terry Zwigoff made his debut feature Louie Bluie in 1985, he didn’t have big plans for a movie career. “My expectations were to show it in my living room to friends,” he explains in a new interview with the...
Short Takes
Aug 9, 2010 — We’re always tickled by the entries in the Guardian’s Films That Changed My Life series, in which directors and actors wax eloquent about the films that have been most formative for them. This week, the publication asked actor Alfred Molina...
Short Takes
Aug 2, 2010 — The great, beloved screenwriter Suso Cecchi D’Amico died this past weekend at the age of ninety-six. A longtime collaborator of Luchino Visconti’s (they’re pictured together above), including on the epic The Leopard (1963), Cecchi D’Amico worked with just about every...
Jul 26, 2010 — The Story of a Cheat: Breaking the Rules While most filmmakers arrive at their profession already possessed of a vigorous love of cinema, Sacha Guitry saw the form, at least at first, as a necessary evil. Paris’s most popular and prolific...
Short Takes
May 11, 2010 — The great Japanese actor Kei Sato passed away last week; he was eighty-one years old. You may not recognize Sato’s name, but if you’ve seen a Japanese film in the past fifty years, there’s a reasonably good chance you’ve fallen,...