The Criterion Collection
Jun 12, 2017 — Informed by his work in theater and his travels through rural America, Nicholas Ray brought an outsider’s perspective to genre filmmaking in his debut feature.
Oct 7, 2015 — It’s night in the desert. Mike (River Phoenix), a teenage hustler given to bouts of narcolepsy, and Scott (Keanu Reeves), a slumming preppy prince, are huddled over a campfire. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The...
Feb 24, 2015 — Federico Fellini’s fragmentary and picturesque tale of death and debauchery in ancient Rome is a surreal take on reality.
Jun 25, 2014 — Hearts and Minds is the classic antiwar documentary film of the Vietnam era. It was released in 1974, one year after the United States withdrew its military forces from Vietnam and a year before North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front...
Feb 17, 2014 — Flailing fathers, anxious mothers, and their moody offspring—these characters may have tails, but they’re Wes Anderson people through and through.
Essays
Jul 17, 2012 — Down by Law, released in 1986, was Jim Jarmusch’s third movie. Unlike its predecessors, Permanent Vacation (1980) and Stranger Than Paradise (1984), it did not take off from a semi-documentary view of downtown Manhattan. It was shot entirely on location...
Features
Nov 9, 2009 — The following essay, written in October 1987, after the release of Wings of Desire, originally appeared in The Logic of Images, a collection of Wim Wenders’s writing that was published in 1992. In the last few years, since Paris, Texas, Berlin...
Aug 17, 2009 — Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, a mesmerizing study of stasis and containment, time and domestic anxiety. Stretching its title character’s daily household routine in long, stark takes, Akerman’s film simultaneously allows viewers to...
Jul 21, 2008 — Akira Kurosawa’s modern adaptation of an American thriller represents a departure from his usual themes and stylistic choices.
Essays
Feb 18, 2008 — Actor and writer Linda Sandoval met Alex Cox in 1983, when her husband, Miguel Sandoval, was cast in Repo Man (she recalls that Cox phoned to say he had good news and bad news: the bad news was that Miguel...