The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 22, 2010 — It’s easy to get anxious about the place of Jean-Luc Godard in our cultural slipstream. He’s held a top-shelf slot of honor that has seemed unassailable for nearly sixty years, but sometimes I fear that his currency is becoming drastically...
The Daily
Jan 30, 2025 — The next four days see the spotlights hit Frederick Wiseman, Jerry Schatzberg, Chantal Akerman, and more.
Essays
Mar 8, 2022 — A parable of wayward women in a world without mothers, Márta Mészáros’s 1975 feature catapulted the Hungarian auteur to international prominence.
Nov 22, 2021 — Songbook Tootsie is a film about love and desire. Audiences are prone to forgetting this amid the controversies that have arisen around its gender-crossing conceit. Back in 1982, the film emerged as one of the decade’s prestige comedies: it was...
The Daily
Mar 5, 2021 — This week offers a new magazine, conversations with Guy Maddin and the great women filmmakers of the 1970s, and a new restoration of a Hong Kong classic.
Jan 7, 2021 — That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) is often referred to as Luis Buñuel’s “testament” work, the apotheosis of his remarkable career as a filmmaker. It perfectly blends the type of outrageous surrealism he pioneered in the late twenties and early...
The Daily
Oct 19, 2020 — The irrepressible spirit of Pasolini wafts in and out of this month’s round.
Essays
Nov 15, 2011 — The thematic ideas and inspirations that sparked Three Colors: Blue (1993), though typically ambitious in scope, seem sketchy when compared to the intense experience of watching this exquisite film. We know that Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors trilogy corresponds to the...
Mar 22, 2011 — In 1985, deep into the twelve-year reign of the Reagan-Bush administration, Rob Epstein mounted a Hollywood stage with Richard Schmiechen, both men resplendent in tuxedos. Epstein was only twenty-nine years old. The director had just made history, with producer Schmiechen,...
Feb 1, 2011 — This essay was originally published in the booklet accompanying the 2006 DVD release of The Double Life of Véronique. A new life experience is in the air today, a perception that explodes the form of the linear narrative and renders...