The Criterion Collection
Apr 15, 2009 — Artist Jaime Hernandez’s diabolically clever illustrations for our release of Divorce Italian Style (now available as a signed art print at the Criterion store) made for one of our most popular DVD covers. And this month, Hernandez has sent us...
Apr 9, 2009 — The first time I “met” Max was in May of 1959, when Bergman’s stunning production of Urfaust came to London for just one week in the World Theatre Season. Groupie of all things Swedish that I was, I waited outside...
Mar 30, 2009 — You can add James Franco to the list of Criterion’s most ardent fans. This month, the actor, seen left in a photo recalling My Own Private Idaho, taken by Gus Van Sant in Oregon in fall 2008, has contributed to...
Mar 18, 2009 — Writer, critic, and film lecturer Teruyo Nogami also served as one of Akira Kurosawa’s principal assistants. Hired as script supervisor on 1950’s Rashomon, Nogami went on to work on all of Kurosawa’s subsequent films, later chronicling their unique relationship in...
Essays
Mar 10, 2009 — Akira Kurosawa made Dodes’ka-den (1970) during the most crisis-laden period of his career. He had just spent two years embroiled in an ill-fated venture with the Hollywood studio Twentieth Century Fox to direct the Japanese segments of the World War...
Jan 22, 2009 — I’ve fulfilled a dream to become a part of the Criterion family. Criterion has helped to preserve not only the films I grew up with but also the ones I’m now trying to keep up with. Picking ten is worse...
Jan 15, 2009 — I have never seen New York look so beautifully grand as it did during my trip to Paris this New Year’s. Maybe I should explain. It was my great fortune to be visiting the City of Light while the intensely...
Dec 29, 2008 — If I had not seen The Lady Vanishes at the age of seven, I might never have become a film critic. I was the fifth child of parents well into middle age: clearly an “accident,” as I was ten-years-plus younger...
Dec 21, 2008 — André Bazin has a curious status in intellectual life. He is everywhere admitted as the founding father of film criticism and theory in general. The magazine he created in the 1950s, Cahiers du cinéma, has good claim to be the...
Dec 15, 2008 — Flash back to September 1968. The Swedish Film Week in Sorrento, Italy, with its alfresco suppers and its excursions to Capri and Pompeii. Ingmar Bergman was expected, and he and Liv Ullmann were assigned a luxurious villa for the duration....