Do Ankhen Barah Haath

May 26, 2008 — As Britain stood on the threshold of a long-dreaded war in 1939, Alexander Korda decided to show what cinema could do to rally the nation and win support around the world.

Sep 17, 2007 — I set out on my first trip to the Toronto Film Festival ready to feast on films and spend relaxed, indulgent, quality time with writers I work with, or hope to work with, as the editorial director here at Criterion....

Sep 3, 2007 — I’m on a flight back from the Telluride Film Festival and two and a half great days in the mountains. Telluride has been an important festival for Criterion and Janus for years. It’s a great opportunity to mingle with filmmakers...

Feb 21, 2007 — It was bound to happen. After a good start for the blog, a quiet stretch. The year has gotten off to a busy start. Every minute there seems to be a meeting with a new player about a new technology...

Jan 4, 2007 — As we get back from vacation, the e-mail boxes are full. Kim, several of the other producers, and I have been doing our best to get to it all, but it’s beginning to pile up. We’ve been pretty good about...

Jan 1, 2007 — I’ve started writing this several times, and each time I’ve gotten diverted. Originally, I wrote about our troops in Iraq and the fact that we had sent along DVDs for the holidays, but I had a hard time equating our...

Nov 23, 2006 — I first met Robert Altman in person in 1999, when I was producing a series of video introductions featuring contemporary directors discussing their favorite Janus films. Altman was the first Criterion director to respond to our request. We had sent...

Nov 20, 2006 — It’s been a few weeks since Peter and I started this blog, and we are gratified that the response has been so positive. We debated for a while whether or not I should have hot-linked my email address last week,...

Jun 21, 2004 — Indefatigably productive, ingenious, exasperating, narcissistically didactic, slyly self-promoting, abject, generous, exploitative, devoted to the wretched of the earth with honest fervor and deluded romanticism: Pier Paolo Pasolini can easily exhaust the adjective-prone, as man and artist, his person and his...

Apr 19, 2004 — “Floating weeds, drifting down the leisurely river of our lives,” has long been a favored metaphor in Japanese prose and poetry. This plant, the ukigusa (duckweed in English), floating aimlessly, carried by stronger currents, is seen as emblematic of our...