The Criterion Collection
In Theaters
May 23, 2012 — Repertory PicksWhen most people think of Peter Falk, who died in June 2011, they recall his indelible embodiment of TV detective Frank Columbo. Yet movie lovers also remember the legendary, smoky-voiced actor for his slew of unforgettable big-screen roles, from...
May 22, 2012 — These five films chart the unlikely ascendance of a hero of American underground cinema.
Sneak Peeks
May 21, 2012 — Certified Copy is no ordinary love story. Though it initially seems like a typical romance, featuring two strangers who meet in a picturesque Tuscan town, it is one of the trickiest films in recent memory. Earlier this year, its director,...
May 17, 2012 — Robert Downey Sr. and Paul Thomas Anderson have been close friends for years. (You can see Downey in a memorable cameo as a record producer in Anderson’s 1997 film Boogie Nights.) Last month, the two directors came to the Criterion...
Short Takes
May 17, 2012 — The latest comedy by Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom, had its world premiere yesterday at the Cannes Film Festival, and was very warmly received. We hope Anderson is having better luck communicating with French interviewers than he did when he and...
May 15, 2012 — Circumlocutory critic Perkus Tooth sits down with a very patient Spike Jonze to talk gerunds and colons.
May 11, 2012 — Did You See This? • Yes, Ingmar Bergman visited the set of Jaws • Where have all the movie palaces gone? • Playing dress-up with gangsters • Robert Pattinson is crazy for Cronenberg • Wim Wenders’s strange and quiet places...
Short Takes
May 11, 2012 — We spread the word about Larisa Shepitko, one of the true visionaries of Soviet cinema, when we released two of her incredible films in 2008, but she remains an under-the-radar figure for most movie lovers. By 1979, when she was...
Essays
May 9, 2012 — The paradox of the biopic is that the need to give fictional characters the kind of messy, defining behavior that makes them ring true—makes them, in the vocabulary of development, “relatable”—is usually overlooked when an actual life is condensed into...
May 8, 2012 — To start on a personal note: I wrote a book about La haine that came out in November 2005, just as the Paris suburbs (banlieues) erupted in an unprecedented wave of violence. Every night, as in the Bob Marley song we...