The Criterion Collection
Essays
Jun 27, 2005 — Like his earlier adaptations of Terence Rattigan plays, Anthony Asquith’s late work is bereft of heavy-handed directorial flourishes.
Jun 27, 2005 — Kô Nakahira’s taboo-busting melodrama heralded a reinvention of Japanese cinema.
Jun 27, 2005 — Ko Nakahira’s Nikkatsu Studio youth flick helped transform postwar Japanese cinema.
Essays
Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...
Jun 13, 2005 — Ernst Lubitsch was a big-city director. The historical dramas that he made in Germany in the late 1910s and early 1920s were known around the world for their distinctively urbane approach, focusing on the private lives of public people. This...
May 9, 2005 — Les Blank’s documentary examines the interaction of premodern tribal existence with European modernity, epitomized by a movie narrative about the invidious clash of brute nature and a singular ego bent on his own mission of cultural enlightenment.
Essays
May 9, 2005 — This seminal documentary conveys the particular seductiveness and resonance of the dream of going pro for two talented Chicago teenagers.
Essays
Apr 25, 2005 — Andrzej Wajda’s first feature film marks the beginning of the Polish School, the paradigm of Polish cinema that arose from the political and cultural thaw of the mid-1950s.
Apr 25, 2005 — Pietro Germi offers locomotive relief in this comedy about the horrors of inertia.