The Criterion Collection
Sep 29, 2003 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his final energies to bringing the lost, gray years of postwar Germany back to life.
Jun 23, 2003 — Ermanno Olmi’s seldom-cited debut feature, the 1958 Time Stood Still, is a wonderful film, but it was the one-two punch of his second and third films that put him on the international movie scene map. Il Posto and I Fidanzati...
Oct 21, 2002 — The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is one of the great works of art in the history of film, and yet, except for some recent television screenings, this British production is largely unknown in the United States. This is...
Essays
Jun 3, 2002 — Ronald Neame’s character study examines a talented, eccentric artist, who is also difficult, conniving, uncouth, and thoroughly disreputable.
Essays
Feb 19, 2001 — Leaving the theater after the tumultuous world premiere of Do the Right Thing at Cannes in May of 1989, I found myself too shaken to speak, and I avoided the clusters of people where arguments were already heating up. One...
Essays
Jul 14, 1998 — Adirector who knows his genres, Jonathan Demme has never been able to resist turning them inside out. Starting in the film industry as a publicist, Demme was soon hired by Roger Corman as a scriptwriter and then as a director....
Sep 1, 1992 — The evolution of Jason and the Argonauts began in the late 1950s, after the initial success of 20 Million Miles to Earth. Harryhausen and his producer, Charles Schneer, decided to get away from doing “monster-on-the-loose” stories and try something more...
Essays
Jan 13, 1992 — Few films have had as exalted, or as tumultuous, a history as The Devil and Daniel Webster. Directed and produced by William Dieterle at RKO after his triumphant Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Devil and Daniel Webster is the finest...
Nov 9, 1987 — The stories French filmmaker Albert Lamorisse tells in these sharply crafted featurettes are simple, yet they cut straight to the heart of a child’s view of the world.
Essays
Oct 12, 1987 — For more than forty years, The Seventh Seal has been a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged. It launched the international career of its director, Ingmar Bergman, and made a star of its 27-year-old leading actor,...