The Criterion Collection
Sneak Peeks
Jul 20, 2015 — The Black Stallion is more than just a family adventure film; it’s a spectacular visual achievement. This is partly thanks to the brilliant craft of cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who worked closely with director Carroll Ballard so that they could tell...
Jul 14, 2015 — Carroll Ballard’s film is a work of rapture, a mesmerizing adventure that envelops the viewer in the beauties of the natural world.
Jul 13, 2015 — “I think that in a few years, in ten, in twenty, or thirty years, we shall know whether Hiroshima mon amour was the most important film since the war, the first modern film of sound cinema.” That was Eric Rohmer,...
Short Takes
Jul 8, 2015 — Steve Blauner, one of the founders of BBS, the production company that produced Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, The King of Marvin Gardens, and more, died last month at age eighty-one. We were lucky enough to sit down...
Jul 7, 2015 — Our recollections of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 movie The Killers are apt to center on three primary elements: Ernest Hemingway’s story, so literally brought to the screen in the film’s opening scenes; Ava Gardner, carrying the full weight of that late-forties...
Jul 6, 2015 — The Killers (1946) is exemplary film noir from Robert Siodmak, who, on the strength of three films—this, Phantom Lady (1944), and Criss Cross (1949)—stands beside his fellow European exiles Fritz Lang and Otto Preminger as one of noir’s crucial directors....
Essays
Jul 2, 2015 — By recounting the impossibility of making a movie, Federico Fellini ended up creating a masterpiece that almost fell into his lap.
Jul 2, 2015 — Les Blank’s A Poem Is a Naked Person, in theaters courtesy of Janus Films, is a major rediscovery. Now playing at New York’s Film Forum before expanding to cities across the United States, including Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San...
In Theaters
Jul 2, 2015 — Repertory PicksAmong Dustin Hoffman’s indelible cinematic creations are The Graduate’s awkward Benjamin Braddock, Midnight Cowboy’s apoplectic Ratzo Rizzo, and Rain Man’s autistic Raymond Babbit. But nothing in this chameleon’s oeuvre compares to his Dorothy Michaels, the female alter ego invented...
Sneak Peeks
Jun 29, 2015 — The most famous scene in Five Easy Pieces—and perhaps one of the most fondly recalled moments of all of the New American Cinema of the early seventies—is the diner confrontation between Jack Nicholson’s volatile Bobby Dupea and a strict waitress....