Chocolat

May 28, 2013 — Mike Leigh’s breakthrough is a funny film about serious things, and an emotional and slyly political take on consumer culture.

Apr 23, 2013 — Who is Pierre Etaix and where has he been all your life? This is the story of a filmmaker who was vanished, banished, skipped over. It’s as if one of those invisible cubicles mimes are always getting themselves shut in...

Oct 25, 2012 — The following piece by Sunday Bloody Sunday screenwriter Penelope Gilliatt originally appeared as the introduction to the 1971 U.S. publication of the script. A friend of mine who had started scrubbing at fourteen and went on to be a barmaid...

Jun 25, 2012 — For this Edinburgh-based writer and filmmaker, Hitchcock’s Scottish caper is both fantasy and reality.

Mar 27, 2012 — The mysterious letter was signed “Joe.” David Lean’s lawyer had sent me a batch of old correspondence. Struggling with a biography of Lean, I was desperate for any leads, and this one seemed worth following up. But how does one...

Nov 15, 2011 — The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy corresponds to the...

May 8, 2011 — Performances In her performances, actress Shelley Duvall often seems as though she’s walking through a fog. Her gawky-elegant string-bean body moving as though on a conveyer belt, her perpetually goggling saucer eyes staring out at the world yet seeming to...

Mar 28, 2011 — Topsy-Turvy is both an anomaly among the films of Mike Leigh and, contrary as it may seem, a Rosetta stone. On the one hand, it is Leigh’s only costume picture and only biopic—a far cry from the bittersweet, realistic films...

Feb 24, 2010 — Major Barbara: Stage to Screen It was one of the most improbable linkups in the history of either theater or cinema—as unlikely as Andrew Undershaft’s turning over his munitions empire to Adolphus Cusins, his not-quite-yet son-in-law (and newly declared “foundling”),...

Jan 26, 2010 — Today, most people’s knowledge of George Bernard Shaw doesn’t extend much further than his classic comedy Pygmalion. But the legendary playwright and theater critic (1856–1950) wrote more than sixty plays. In February, we at the Criterion Collection will do our part...