History of Love

Feb 13, 2018 — With the scrappiest of means, George A. Romero created not only a landmark of independent cinema but also an indelible portrait of America as hellscape.

Sep 13, 2016 — Kenji Mizoguchi achieved the sublime with this structurally complex portrait of artistic ambition and female subjugation.

Jul 19, 2016 — Time is both inescapable and irretrievable in Alain Resnais’s boldly disorienting masterpiece, which stars Delphine Seyrig as a widow haunted by her memories of World War II.

Jan 13, 2015 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s characters play an endlessly layered game of dress-up in this tale of sadomasochistic love.

Mar 20, 2013 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s adroit masterpiece is war film, dark comedy, historical drama, poignant romance, and a portrait of the modern woman.

Nov 30, 2009 — The following essay was originally written for Criterion’s website in 2005, on the occasion of the DVD release of Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann. We have posted it here to coincide with BFI Southbank’s ongoing Hein Heckroth exhibition...

May 26, 2008 — Though producer Alexander Korda’s adventure movie forms part of a continued tradition of representing the East by purposefully occluding the reality of it, it celebrates the Arabian fantasy as a site of childlike wonder.

Aug 22, 2005 — This delicate, fascinating film is self-consciously, almost militantly, naive, and it remains something of an anomaly in Roberto Rossellini’s body of work.

Feb 2, 2004 — A story about defeat and failure, Robert Bresson’s masterpiece is a milestone in the slow process of the liberation of postwar French cinema

Jan 21, 2002 — A fresco conceived on a majestic scale, Marcel Carné’s masterpiece sweeps its audience back to the 1820s, painting the detail of a world obsessed with both theater and crime.