The Criterion Collection
The Daily
Jan 11, 2018 — The turn of each year always sees a flurry of listing, remembering, and anticipating that seems to knock just plain reading off the agenda for the time being. Now, a little over a week into the new year, we can...
Feb 14, 2012 — For nearly three decades, Hideo Gosha (1929–1992) made some of the most explosive, artful, and original films in Japanese cinema. Along the way, he also became one of his country’s most established and acclaimed filmmakers. But his reputation in the...
Essays
Aug 24, 1989 — Yasujiro Ozu’s favorite theme of the stresses and strains of parent-child relationships figure prominently in this story of a raggle-taggle theater troupe giving its final performances in a small fishing village.
Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...
Essays
Apr 13, 2010 — Indefatigably political Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo, best known for 1966’s truly revolutionary The Battle of Algiers, once stated that “the ideal director should be three-quarters Rossellini and one-quarter Eisenstein.” Certainly, one can see traces of the work of both of...
Essays
Jun 7, 1999 — From the moment of its first appearance, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959—where it won the Palme d’Or—it was clear that Black Orpheus was a very special film. Taking the ancient Greek myth of a youth who travels to...
Mar 9, 2012 — The cinematographer tells us how he and Louis Malle went about shooting Vanya on 42nd Street in a decrepit Manhattan theater.
Apr 2, 2018 — Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, Barry Levinson is an Academy Award–winning director, screenwriter, and producer. His 1988 film Rain Man, starring Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise, won multiple Oscars, including one for best picture. His 1991 film Bugsy received...
Jul 7, 2017 — Canadian-born filmmaker Alison Maclean emigrated to New Zealand as a teenager and later attended Elam Art School in Auckland. After making Kitchen Sink (1989), still arguably the most successful short film to come out of New Zealand, and her debut...
Apr 21, 2017 — Nathan Silver graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2005. Since then, he has written and directed four short films and eight feature films: The Blind (2009), Exit Elena (2012), Soft in the Head (2013), Uncertain...