The Criterion Collection
Sep 28, 2015 — Rarely has schizophrenia been closer to the surface of American cinema than in the transitional period of 1968–71. Hollywood had just abandoned its censorship code after nearly thirty-five years, and the behemoth studios were heaving and rattling into oblivion or...
May 19, 2015 — Charlie Chaplin’s intensely emotional drama is a dream film about show business, history, and death.
Apr 20, 2015 — "Afilm about India without elephants and tiger hunts”—this was how Jean Renoir described his objective in making The River. Guided by Rumer Godden’s autobiographical novel, he rejected the India of exotic action and spectacle to make a meditative, almost mystical...
Features
Mar 19, 2015 — The author recalls his encounters and correspondence with the filmmaker.
Feb 10, 2015 — The late film scholar beautifully analyzes the visual lyricism of the French master’s legendary short work.
Short Takes
Jan 24, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki first read Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème in 1976. The highly influential 1851 book—an episodic novel about a group of starving artists that also inspired Puccini’s 1896 opera La bohème—captured the Finnish filmmaker’s imagination and,...
Jan 20, 2014 — Aki Kaurismäki pays wry tribute to the starving artist in his sad and funny update of Henri Murger’s classic book.
Sep 9, 2013 — As outré as it is, the most subversive thing about this classic farce is its take on what’s normal.
Sep 26, 2012 — Countercultural icons Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov makes square subversive in Bartel’s cult classic.
Sep 18, 2012 — Marcel Carné’s theatrical spectacle set in early nineteenth-century Paris is an operatic work about passion and artifice.