No Other Land

Jul 5, 2016 — Arthur Hiller’s 1979 comedy pairs Alan Arkin and Peter Falk as unlikely comrades in a madcap farce that lands every laugh.

Oct 21, 2015 — Masaki Kobayashi takes on broken vows and the unreality of the past in his sensual and spooky four-part adaptation of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese folktales.

Jul 30, 2015 — It is now thirty years since the release of Stephen Frears’s film, which was both a product of and a response to the social and political landscape of 1980s Britain and depicted the lives of Pakistani immigrants with wit and...

Feb 28, 2014 — Other first films exude the sparkling joy of filmmaking that one feels in Breathless, but how many can boast its sure-handedness?

Sep 13, 2011 — Hollywood has been importing talented European filmmakers at least since the early twenties, when Victor Sjöström and Ernst Lubitsch heeded the siren wail of Tinseltown resources, and their work there has tended to quickly obscure the cultural memory of the...

Apr 12, 2011 — With his 1970 gangster epic Le cercle rouge, Jean-Pierre Melville finally landed his white whale.

Nov 30, 2009 — The following essay was originally written for Criterion’s website in 2005, on the occasion of the DVD release of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. We have posted it here to coincide with BFI Southbank’s ongoing Hein Heckroth exhibition...

Dec 2, 2008 — The Danish director explains movie magic and confesses his carnal sins in this impassioned artist statement written to accompany the films that make up his Europe Trilogy

Jan 14, 2008 — As Japan was coming out of World War II, Akira Kurosawa was coming into his own as a filmmaker.

Jul 9, 2007 — The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker,...