The Criterion Collection
May 25, 2017 — “Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary,” begins Jay Weissberg in Variety. “His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films (My Joy,...
Oct 18, 2011 — Hair, There, and Everywhere Are the Leningrad Cowboys for real? With pointy pompadours reaching to impossible heights above their expressionless faces and needlelike winklepicker shoes that could have been torn from the feet of oversize elves, they might be a...
Essays
Feb 9, 2010 — You can’t keep a good woman, or a great movie about a good woman, down. By all accounts, goodness in the real Lola Montez reflected the vagaries of character, not talent. She was, as Cosmo Brown says of Lina Lamont...
Jan 22, 2007 — Spencer Gordon Bennet’s eclectic science fiction–adventure movie bundles a serious patriotic message within its retelling of the Odysseus myth.
Mar 20, 2013 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s adroit masterpiece is war film, dark comedy, historical drama, poignant romance, and a portrait of the modern woman.
Jul 23, 2024 — Chen Kaige’s sweeping epic chronicles the history of twentieth-century China through the story of two childhood friends, contrasting the unchanging traditions of their Beijing-opera milieu with the nation’s swift and turbulent transformation.
Mar 23, 2009 — The most crowd-pleasing film of François Truffaut’s latter career is also one of his most personal, drawing from his memories of the German occupation of France, his schoolboy years and his lifelong infatuation with the creative arts.
Essays
Jun 25, 2013 — How Claude Lanzmann made a thoughtful film about the unthinkable and unfilmable.
Jun 19, 2013 — Disorienting, brutal, and bloody beautiful, František Vláčil’s epic is a dark medieval vision teeming with cinematic invention.
May 26, 2003 — Transcription of a speech given by long-time Derek Jarman collaborator and friend, actress Tilda Swinton