The Criterion Collection
May 20, 2009 — The title alone screams incongruity. Shohei Imamura’s 1961 black-and-white caper movie Pigs and Battleships bursts with the confusion and exuberance of a cross-cultural encounter. In its lively portrayal of enthusiastic Japanese locals welcoming the U.S. Navy on R&R to the...
May 14, 2009 — A new, restored print of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes is premiering in Cannes tonight, with Martin Scorsese going onstage to introduce it. So what’s the big Scorsese-Powell connection anyway? Well, you can learn all about it...
May 14, 2009 — Here’s a definite must-read: in its latest issue, Bright Lights Film Journal features André Bazin’s essay “Fifteen Years of French Cinema,” in its first-ever English translation (by Bert Cardullo). Originally delivered as a lecture in 1957, and later published in...
May 13, 2009 — Alexander Korda’s oeuvre is often characterized as larger-than-life, undoubtedly in part because the figures he was attracted to—kings and queens, legendary lovers and great artists—were often extraordinary.
May 11, 2009 — Novelists learn not to expect too much when their books are made into movies. Obviously, great fiction has been turned into great cinema, but the dents and scrapes that so many classics have sustained on the rocky road from the...
May 10, 2009 — Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the forest: a “definitive” new restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will premiere at New York’s Film Forum on May 29,...
May 5, 2009 — Irecently had occasion to show Ivan the Terrible in a course on forties world cinema I’m teaching at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute, and found it more mind-boggling than ever. This has always been the Eisenstein feature that’s given...
May 5, 2009 — Every second of David Fincher’s uncanny drama—every shot and every cut, every gesture and every facial expression, every turn in its narrative and every visual effect—is devoted to the contemplation of time’s passing.
May 3, 2009 — Though primarily a celebration of the best of today’s world cinema, the Cannes Film Festival has for some time now also been making room for the past, with its sidebar Cannes Classics. A program of restored and rediscovered films, Cannes...
Apr 30, 2009 — Following the lead of Andrew Sarris’s rave review last week, critics continue to praise Revanche, the brooding crime drama of guilt and retribution opening in theaters today, from Janus Films. “Revanche gets its hooks into you early and leaves them...