The Criterion Collection
Essays
May 24, 2011 — Andrei Tarkovsky belongs to that handful of filmmakers (Dreyer, Bresson, Vigo, Tati) who, with a small, concentrated body of work, created a universe. Though he made only seven features, thwarted by Soviet censors and then by cancer, each honored his...
Short Takes
May 24, 2011 — One Scene The first time I saw Solaris was on VHS in the mid-nineties. Even though the film affected me profoundly, I never watched it again until now. The richness of the images, the vividness of the mood, and the depth...
May 24, 2011 — In 1938, Charles Chaplin deposited with the Library of Congress a script for a film to be called The Dictator, and told the press it was a project in which he would play a double role. He clearly had Hitler...
Production Notes
May 22, 2011 — We received the sad news that Leonard Kastle, director of The Honeymoon Killers, passed away on Wednesday at his home in Westerlo, NY, at the age of eighty-two. In addition to writing and directing that film, Mr. Kastle was an...
We have a killer selection of Japanese gangster films—or yakuza pictures—all from the genre’s heyday in the fifties and sixties.
May 19, 2011 — About selecting his favorites from the collection, world-class cinematographer John Bailey (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) says, “One of the greatest challenges in trying to compile a list like this is to separate the objectively ‘great’ films from the...
Features
May 19, 2011 — If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. This is the deflating conventional wisdom among art-house and repertory theater owners today. Which is why the success of Film Streams, at the Ruth Sokolof Theater in Omaha, Nebraska, is such a thrill...
Interviews
May 18, 2011 — It’s an exciting day at Criterion; Liar’s Kiss, a graphic novel written by our own Eric Skillman, designer of many of our most iconic DVD and Blu-ray covers, and drawn by Jhomar Soriano, hits stores today. We exchanged some e-mails...
Essays
May 17, 2011 — “There was a strong influence of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal throughout this film,” director Masahiro Shinoda would later remember of his 1964 squid-ink noir Pale Flower, made in the days when his career as a filmmaker and founding figure of...