The Criterion Collection
Jun 23, 2014 — Peter Davis’s provocative, Oscar-winning Hearts and Minds, released to the American public in 1974, is that rare documentary whose truths and relevance have been underlined and amplified by the passage of time. The title is derived from President Lyndon B....
Jun 19, 2014 — PerformancesTime has added some latter-day ironies to All That Heaven Allows, and not just the revelation that its star Rock Hudson was gay. There’s also the political career of Ronald Reagan, the ex-husband of Hudson’s costar, Jane Wyman—built on the...
Jun 17, 2014 — The brutal lessons of Vietnam remained in America’s national consciousness for a generation. September 11 gave us collective amnesia, and they’ve had to be learned again.
Jun 10, 2014 — Douglas Sirk once said: “This is the dialectic—there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.” When All That Heaven Allows was...
Features
May 14, 2014 — The author recalls his meetings and correspondence with the uncompromisingly independent British director.
May 5, 2014 — Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against...
Apr 14, 2014 — Lars von Trier brought his brand of provocation to his widest audience yet with this inquiry into faith and human goodness.
Feb 28, 2014 — The Great Beauty, which is up for best foreign-language film at Sunday’s Academy Awards, feels at times like a glorious throwback to a time when art-house cinema reigned. Feeling nostalgic for that era, when films by the great directors of world...
Feb 18, 2014 — The immediacy of an ongoing war electrifies Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful second Hollywood feature.
Features
Dec 22, 2013 — The author reflects on his interactions with the great filmmaker.