The Criterion Collection
Visual Analysis
Jun 21, 2012 — Chris Marker’s La Jetée is the kind of film that haunts the brain. This quality is attributable not only to its unforgettable postapocalyptic imagery but also to its soundscapes, as spare as they are ravishing and mysterious. In this new...
Jun 13, 2012 — Tasteful British cinema got a refreshing dose of amorality with Danny Boyle’s stylish and violent tale of greed and paranoia.
Short Takes
Mar 16, 2012 — One Scene 1973 Ford Pinto with Tanguy Sky (“3 Women”) 2011 | oil on canvas | 40 x 60 inches Robert Altman’s 3 Women is a surrealistic and unsettling study in identity theft, where personalities intertwine and unravel amid the desolation of the American...
Short Takes
Oct 26, 2011 — Piercing chamber drama though it may be, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers would seem an unlikely candidate for the theater, so quiet, vivid, and intimate is its story of a dying woman and the sisters who fail to offer her...
Oct 18, 2011 — Hair, There, and Everywhere Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a...
Akira Kurosawa once said, “The ordinary Japanese actor might need ten feet of film to get across an impression. Toshiro Mifune needed only three feet.” The filmmaker certainly gave Mifune a lot of space, however: over the course of sixteen...
This Belgian visionary took a profoundly personal and aesthetically idiosyncratic approach to film form, using it to investigate geography and identity, space and time, sexuality and religion.
Features
Sep 17, 2010 — This has been a luminous year for the world-renowned Toronto International Film Festival, now in its thirty-fifth edition—and not only because of the high quality of the films. When the ten-day event began, buzz was already in the air about...
Short Takes
Nov 13, 2009 — Japanese director Nobuhiko Obayashi, who made the utterly bonkers 1977 kinda-horror film House, currently getting a first-time American theatrical run from Janus Films, is profiled by Paul Roquet in a new essay for Midnight Eye. One of the few pieces...
Nov 2, 2009 — The following, written in 1986, is from the first treatment for Wings of Desire. And we, spectators always, everywhere,looking at, never out of, everything!—Rilke, “The Eighth Elegy” At first it’s not possible to describe anything beyond a wish or a...