Black Wind

Nov 9, 2006 — For years now, Peter has been the public face of Criterion. It’s great to have my partner fielding the brunt of the questions, sitting on the panels, and speaking poetically for all of us. We’ve been partners now for about...

Oct 16, 2006 — Lodge Kerrigan’s grim, lucid dispatch from the murky depths of madness situates itself inside the tormented consciousness of a schizophrenic.

Sep 18, 2006 — Released in 1973, in the dying days of General Franco’s forty-year dictatorship, The Spirit of the Beehive soon established itself as the consummate masterpiece of Spanish cinema. Yet, strangely, many of the gifted artists who collaborated on Víctor Erice’s first...

Jan 5, 2006 — Akira Kurosawa appreciated Shake­speare’s knack for linking the private and the political, threading a tale of corruption and revenge through a tangle of blood ties.

Jun 13, 2005 — Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,...

Sep 13, 2004 — About a year and a half ago, a friend and I found ourselves exiled to a cold Midwestern city, where we spent most of our time missing the lazy Texas college town that shaped our idea of the good life....

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

Feb 2, 2004 — Barbet Schroeder’s tale of two lovers executes their affair against a backdrop of jaw-dropping sadomasochistic activity.

Jan 5, 2004 — Jacques Tati’s second tale about the whimsical wanderer Monsieur Hulot, this classic comedy presents a world in which characters are defined solely by their actions.

Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...