The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 23, 2008 — The possession of a real voice is always a marvel, an almost religious thing.
Essays
Sep 15, 2008 — Max Ophuls’s 1952 comedy celebrates existence by presenting a world full of unresolvable contradictions.
Aug 18, 2008 — One of the most awarded films in Japanese history, Keisuke Kinoshita’s nostalgia piece unfolds a celebration of family values and scenic beauty.
Aug 11, 2008 — Every Guy Maddin movie creates the illusion of a secret history. His willfully primitive cut-rate spectacles seem like artifacts, reanimated bits of cultural detritus, but also like hauntings, the return of the cinematic repressed. From the start, Maddin’s sensibility was...
Essays
Jul 21, 2008 — A dreamy alternative to the standard notion of horror, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s phantasmal film reimagined the figure of the vampire.
Jun 30, 2008 — The idea of self-fashioning—of deliberately taking the raw materials of one’s body and mind and transforming them into a work of art—has been with us at least since the Renaissance. Yet no one, not even Oscar Wilde, has so rigorously...
Jun 23, 2008 — The year 1950 marked a turning point in Anthony Mann’s career, the moment when he passed from the series of brilliant film-noir B movies that had established him to the westerns that made him a major figure. Mann released three...
Jun 16, 2008 — Decades later, we’ve come to understand that Claude Sautet’s film—in a less gaudy and obvious, more secretive, insidious way—was just as revolutionary as Breathless.
Essays
May 12, 2008 — If ever an actor could reconcile his natural-born swagger with a kind of pervasive lethargy it was Maurice Ronet, the star of Louis Malle’s staggering psychological drama.
Apr 21, 2008 — Juan Antonio Bardem combines neorealism with noir thriller to create a new dialect that would forge a new Spanish cinematic language.