The Criterion Collection
May 3, 2016 — Last night, HBO premiered British filmmaker Adam Benzine’s Oscar-nominated documentary Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah. In interviews and dug-up footage, Benzine’s film traces the twelve-year production of Shoah, Lanzmann’s groundbreaking nine-hour 1985 Holocaust documentary. Shoah, which eschewed archival images...
Apr 26, 2016 — “It is not an exaggeration to say that before Primary, documentary as we know it today—the art of candid observation—didn’t exist,” writes Thom Powers.
Mar 23, 2016 — We had come to expect Chantal Akerman’s periodic gifts of small and large cinematic gems. Certain of this flow, we were devastated when, all too abruptly, we were forced to think of her latest film, so beautiful, as her last.
Essays
Mar 17, 2016 — Decades later, Ingmar Bergman’s self-reflexive masterpiece remains a provocative enigma worthy of close investigation.
Short Takes
Mar 9, 2016 — Earlier this year we were proud to release Swedish director Jan Troell’s two-film epic, The Emigrants (1971) and The New Land (1972). The films, starring Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow, are based on Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg’s four-part series...
Mar 4, 2016 — Over the past half century, production designer Jack Fisk has created some of cinema’s most memorable on-screen worlds—from the farmlands of early-twentieth-century Texas to the byways of contemporary Los Angeles.
Features
Mar 3, 2016 — By the time Charlie Chaplin began work on what would be his first feature-length film, in 1919, he had been sneaking up to the longer format for some time.
Production Notes
Jan 15, 2016 — The filmmaker and cinematographer had a lifelong commitment to the camera and how it could be used to foster dialogue and action.
Jan 12, 2016 — In German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s high-strung thriller, adapted from two Patricia Highsmith novels, Dennis Hopper plays sociopathic con man Tom Ripley as a “hopped-up elf from hell” who works his charms on a winsome and guileless Bruno Ganz.
Features
Jan 5, 2016 — The late Haskell Wexler wore many hats—he was an independent, impassioned documentarian; a commercial Hollywood cinematographer; a political and social activist; an institutional (even union) contrarian. He was also an exemplar of how to live.