The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Nov 4, 2011 — John Cassavetes’ almost unbearably intimate Faces is getting even more close-up and personal: experimental filmmaker James Benning has constructed a “remake” of the film, set to premiere at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna on November 19 as part of...
Oct 28, 2011 — The following is excerpted from a 1972 interview that film scholar Joan Mellen conducted with director Kaneto Shindo. The interview originally appeared in the 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema. I find the social dimension of your films very...
Short Takes
Oct 26, 2011 — Piercing chamber drama though it may be, Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers would seem an unlikely candidate for the theater, so quiet, vivid, and intimate is its story of a dying woman and the sisters who fail to offer her...
Oct 26, 2011 — Performances The galumphing hulk who terrorized early sound cinema audiences in Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932), Boris Karloff was the movies’ politest monster. Even in his darkest on-screen moments, the London-born Karloff (né William Henry Pratt) exhibited a regal...
Essays
Oct 25, 2011 — The film is made up of a succession of small visions, observed and executed with apparent ease but thought through with such exquisite care and attention that the experience becomes overwhelming.
Oct 25, 2011 — The central theme of the film is that the life force inherent in this music is always with us, but you are an idiot if you want to turn on the wayback machine and relive these days.
Oct 25, 2011 — It’s not a movie about how things were; it’s a movie about how things are remembered.
Oct 25, 2011 — An Erle C. Kenton–directed Paramount feature based on the 1896 H. G. Wells novel The Island of Dr. Moreau, Island of Lost Souls (1932) is the story of a mad scientist’s attempts to convert wild animals into human beings by...
Oct 24, 2011 — “For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis,” says the narrator of Don DeLillo’s novel The Names. “It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of...
Oct 18, 2011 — Hair, There, and Everywhere Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a...