The Criterion Collection
Essays
Nov 15, 2004 — Short Cuts is an L.A. jazz rhapsody that represents Robert Altman at an all-time personal peak—and it came at just the right time in his career.
Feb 16, 2004 — Ronald Neame’s Tunes of Glory (1960), which was widely admired when it was first released, has subsequently kept a low profile. This says more about critical attitudes and British film culture than it does about the quality of the movie....
Sep 29, 2003 — In May 1981, in the midst of shooting Lola, Rainer Werner Fassbinder sketched out his next film project: Sybille Schmitz. On the cover, he had written, “Story for a Feature Film*.” The asterisk pointed to this footnote: “It is possible...
Sep 29, 2003 — Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his final energies to bringing the lost, gray years of postwar Germany back to life.
Essays
Jun 23, 2003 — Alain Resnais’s antidocumentary never purports to “document” the heinous realities of the Holocaust; instead, it interrogates our responses.
Mar 24, 2003 — Straw Dogs turns on a woman’s rape, and one can’t blame pictures for depicting. But the film shows the woman, after some tart resistance, seeming to enjoy it, and this approaches the apex of what a delicate soul might call...
Essays
Mar 4, 2002 — Wong Kar-wai’s biggest commercial success to date elevated him to the mainstream of international art house cinema, and it echoes the end of an era with pure melancholic power.
Essays
Nov 26, 2001 — Peter Weir’s first film to be released in America insists on the tangible power of spiritual life.
Essays
Oct 15, 2001 — Preston Sturges’s beloved comedy provides insights into the way Hollywood formulas work on us.
Essays
Sep 17, 2001 — Jirí Menzel’s war comedy is an absurdist symphony of self-absorption and impotence.