The Criterion Collection
Features
Sep 16, 2010 — Seven years ago, I was a bright-eyed recent university grad who had just moved to the big city—Toronto—for the first time. I was struggling to find my path as a filmmaker, and at the Toronto International Film Festival that year,...
Mar 17, 2010 — 1. A Park—Night A man aflame is running directly toward camera. This image, which comes from Nicholas Ray’s initial treatment for Rebel Without a Cause, might stand at the head of almost any of Ray’s movies, since it so clearly...
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.
May 12, 2008 — This intensely personal work about a self-destructive young man would help alleviate Louis Malle’s doubts about his career.
Nov 19, 2007 — Akira Kurosawa explores criminal machismo in his seventh film, which he felt was his official breakthrough in Japanese cinema.
Jun 18, 2007 — Dušan Makavejev’s masterpiece explores sexual freedoms and their perils in both New York and Belgrade, using each city and set of practices and problems to help define the other.
Feb 12, 2007 — In this classical whodunit made just after the close of World War II, swirling sexual frustrations and resentments find expression in a series of apparently motiveless murders.
Mar 27, 2006 — Louis Malle’s coming-of-age drama offers an unusually full and individualized characterization of a boy whose yearnings, sensitivities, and fantasies outstrip his personality.
Mar 14, 2005 — The first time I put an eye behind a camera (a 16mm Bell & Howell), it was in a lunatic asylum. The head of the institution was a great big hulk of a man with a face so ravaged by...
Essays
Feb 16, 2004 — Henri-Georges Clouzot took the standard ingredients of the Continental-Films detective movies and used them to make something darker and more complex—to make, in fact, the first classic French film noir.