The Criterion Collection
Jan 25, 2012 — Creating an effect of pity and terror unique in Francesco Rosi’s cinema, The Moment of Truth ought by rights to be counted among his finest achievements. On its original release in 1965, Pauline Kael acclaimed “the beauty of rage, masterfully...
Oct 17, 2011 — Scratch the surface of a contemporary J-horror classic like Ringu (1998) or any of the Ju-on films (2000–03) and you’ll glimpse Yabu no naka no kuroneko (Black Cat from the Grove), released in the U.S. as simply Kuroneko (1968). Shot...
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...
Essays
Jan 14, 2009 — Gregory Nava, with his writing partner and producer, Anna Thomas, made the courageous decision to tell their story of a cold-war battleground from the point-of-view of the colonized “natives,” eschewing an English-speaking protagonist.
Oct 20, 2008 — Costa-Gavras’s film pointedly raised issues that for many people were only dimly in the air at the time, and which have become more and more unavoidable in recent years, as the United States has openly assumed its imperial role.
Essays
Jun 18, 2007 — The audacious and outrageous political comedy by Yugoslav filmmaker Dušan Makavejev jolts viewers out of complacency and encourages freedom, creativity, and bliss.
Mar 12, 2007 — Kon Ichikawa’s incendiary and extraordinarily brutal war film renders the emotional carnage that festers long after the battle’s end.
May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton
The Daily
Oct 17, 2018 — Peter Jackson revamps archival footage from the First World War in They Shall Not Grow Old.