The Criterion Collection
Short Takes
Jan 27, 2016 — Last month, we were thrilled to release the late filmmaker Howard Brookner’s long-awaited documentary, Burroughs: The Movie. Shot over five years, from the late 1970s to the early ’80s, the critically praised film offers an intimate glimpse into the life...
Short Takes
Jan 25, 2016 — Last week, we were saddened to learn of the passing, at the age of eighty-four, of the beloved Italian writer and director Ettore Scola. The filmmaker was a luminary of Italian cinema for more than half a century, and his...
Essays
Jan 21, 2016 — In Gilda, Charles Vidor’s “violent, sexual, chaotic” noir, the director focused on Rita Hayworth’s skills as an actor and a dancer, eliciting a performance that became iconic in its own right and made her an international superstar.
Jan 20, 2016 — Inside Llewyn Davis (now out on Blu-ray and DVD), the Coen brothers’ latest odyssey into the more desolate corners of Americana, stars Oscar Isaac in the title role, as an ill-fated musician navigating the Greenwich Village folk scene of the...
Short Takes
Jan 20, 2016 — Earlier this month, we lost Vilmos Zsigmond, the venerated Hungarian cinematographer. Not only was he one of the greatest directors of photography in the world—known for his influential work with Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg, and Brian De Palma, among others—Zsigmond...
Jan 19, 2016 — Inside Llewyn Davis takes its protagonist on a Hero’s Journey of characteristically Coen-esque proportions—a voyage at turns serious and comic, and framed by an exquisitely curated selection of folk melodies.
In Theaters
Jan 14, 2016 — Repertory PicksThe Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, New York, hosts a recurring series called Sunday Schmooze, and on offer this weekend is Gabriel Axel’s 1987 gem Babette’s Feast. The Oscar-winning drama, based on a short story by Danish author Karen...
Sneak Peeks
Jan 14, 2016 — For the lead role of Tom Ripley in Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, a melancholy neonoir that fused Wenders’s New German sensibility with classic Hollywood drama, the director needed an actor who could convey menace with complexity. Wenders had his...
Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.
In Theaters
Jan 8, 2016 — In March of 1967, Bosley Crowther, then the film critic for the New York Times, wrote about Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, penning what is now considered one of his most famously wrong-headed reviews.