The Criterion Collection
Aug 11, 2008 — Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Maddin’s sensibility was...
May 9, 2005 — Les Blank’s documentary examines the interaction of premodern tribal existence with European modernity, epitomized by a movie narrative about the invidious clash of brute nature and a singular ego bent on his own mission of cultural enlightenment.
Dec 30, 2003 — Akira Kurosawa was a man of his time, who participated fully in the artistic and intellectual world of Japan from the 1930s until his death in 1998. Although filmgoers may think of him in terms of the screen images he...
Sep 23, 1993 — Two men, one woman and a boy. French director Bertrand Blier fashions out of this bizarre love quadrangle a film of seamless beauty, high farce and, finally, haunting majesty. To experience Get Out Your Handkerchiefs is to watch a master...
Essays
Jun 16, 1992 — Of the 18 movies made by the filmmaking team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, none was as personally and artistically fulfilling as The Tales of Hoffmann. This dazzling screen adaptation of the Offenbach opera—a visual, sonic, and sensual delight—marked...
The Daily
Sep 30, 2024 — Showered with accolades, loved, admired, and feared, Smith was one of the most accomplished stars of the stage and screen.
The Daily
Sep 30, 2017 — “I have seen Zama, and it does indeed have a llama,” announces Cinema Scope editor Mark Peranson in the new issue. “The mysterious circumstances of the film’s long-overdue birth into this world continue with an out-of-competition slot in Venice, an...
Essays
Mar 23, 2010 — In the Akira Kurosawa movie family tree, Sanjuro is the sassy kid brotherto Yojimbo, and like many lighthearted younger siblings, it’s underrated. After Yojimbo achieved blockbuster status in 1961, Kurosawa took a story he’d already developed, about a semistrong but...