Go West

Nov 25, 2010 — Five Easy Pieces is not a statement about America but a closely observed report. Or, perhaps, a confession.

Nov 23, 2010 — Easy Rider is a record of a certain time in American history, and a chronicle of a culture clash that never quite ended.

Nov 23, 2010 — An overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice.—“Porpoise Song”Where there is choice, there is misery.—SwamiHow’s about some more steam?—Sonny Liston The final episode of the television show The Monkees aired March 25, 1968. Cowritten and directed by Micky Dolenz,...

Oct 23, 2010 — In 1945, a teenage Stanley Kubrick was given a job as staff photographer at Look magazine, where he published more than nine hundred striking images, most of them in the realist style of New York School street photography. By the...

Oct 6, 2010 — Last month, we asked you to give us a hand in creating brief ad taglines for our October titles. The response, in comments on the Criterion Current, was so overwhelming that we had trouble narrowing it down. Congratulations to the...

Jul 13, 2010 — At the author’s request, Japanese names are given here in their traditional form: surname first. Ozu Yasujiro’s personal feelings about Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s are not on record. Perhaps, like most people around him, he accepted the...

May 20, 2010 — Driven to Destruction Nagisa Oshima was a destructive force in Japanese cinema—and he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Intent on exploding taboos and jabbing the eye of the status quo, he created films that leave us with a...

Apr 27, 2010 — From left: Marlon Brando, Maureen Stapleton, Tennessee Williams, and producer Richard Shepherd, on the set of The Fugitive Kind. It was Jules Stein, head and founder of MCA, who plucked Richard Shepherd out of Stanford and made him into a real...

Oct 15, 2009 — Full-size sidewalks aren’t very common in outer Tokyo, particularly in the many small residential neighborhoods that surround the city for miles. Likely a holdover from when there weren’t as many cars around and people walked in the roads alongside carts...

Aug 19, 2009 — I Am Waiting: Port of Call The year: 1957. The city: Yokohama, not far from the piers. The sound of the tide softly lapping against stones in the darkness, cubes of black ice in a tumbler of foam. Night. Rain....