The Criterion Collection
Essays
Dec 1, 2015 — Critic Todd McCarthy takes an inside look at Michael Ritchie's outdoor drama, which he calls “spare, cut to the bone, as fine as dry powder. Had Hemingway ever written about competitive skiing, this would have been the right style with...
Nov 18, 2015 — Richard Brooks’s In Cold Blood applied cinematic specificity and flair to the literary realism of Truman Capote’s classic “nonfiction novel.”
Essays
Oct 21, 2015 — Masaki Kobayashi takes on broken vows and the unreality of the past in his sensual and spooky four-part adaptation of Lafcadio Hearn’s Japanese folktales.
Short Takes
Oct 19, 2015 — Take a look back at critics’ initial reactions to David Lynch’s haunting masterpiece Mulholland Dr.
Oct 15, 2015 — Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni are cast against type—and funnyman director Ettore Scola gets serious—in this humane drama set in Fascist Italy.
Essays
Oct 13, 2015 — Divorce wreaks a particularly devastating form of havoc in David Cronenberg's personal take on the dissolution of a marriage.
Oct 7, 2015 — It’s night in the desert. Mike (River Phoenix), a teenage hustler given to bouts of narcolepsy, and Scott (Keanu Reeves), a slumming preppy prince, are huddled over a campfire. “I just want to kiss you, man,” says Mike softly. The...
Sep 29, 2015 — Merchant Ivory Productions’ sun-kissed romantic comedy is an effervescent tale of class and manners among the Edwardian English.
Short Takes
Sep 21, 2015 — This week, veteran director Bruce Beresford joins the collection with Breaker Morant and Mister Johnson, two early twentieth-century period pieces about colonialism and its destructive legacies. Beresford (seen above on the set of Mister Johnson) has been making movies for...
Short Takes
Sep 1, 2015 — Anyone interested in the art of nonfiction filmmaking should get familiar with the work of Allan King. The Canadian documentarian was a pioneer of the Direct Cinema movement of the 1960s, alongside Albert and David Maysles, Richard Leacock, and D....