The Criterion Collection
Feb 23, 2009 — “Those looking for a smart laugh at the expense of the geniuses who steered us into the economic ditch might like to have cinematic wit Luis Buñuel back from the dead,” writes Seth Colter Walls, in an unusual, intriguing feature...
Feb 12, 2009 — This week, French actor Jean Martin died at the age of eighty-six. Thogh he appeared in more than eighty films (including My Name Is Nobody and The Day of the Jackal), Martin is probably best remembered for his role as...
Feb 9, 2009 — Luis Buñuel’s ferociously brilliant The Exterminating Angel (1962) is one of his most provocative and unforgettable works. In it, we watch a trivial breach of etiquette transform into the destruction of civilization. Not only does this story undermine our confidence...
Dec 29, 2008 — It is a good time to belong to the cult of Fuller. Those of us who consider ourselves members never forget our moment of induction. Some enlisted when his films first hit the screen—lucky enough to catch The Steel Helmet...
Dec 2, 2008 — Ian Thomson has written a fascinating piece on Pier Paolo Pasolini for the Times Online, on the occasion of the publication of two books on the Italian filmmaker-writer-poet: John David Rhodes’s new study of Pasolini’s Rome, Stupendous, Miserable City, and...
This patient observer of everyday life in Japan has been enormously influential among filmmakers seeking a cinema of economy and poetry.
"Life caught unawares," that's how Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov defined the principle and art of documentary in the thirties. Yet the documentary has taken so many forms over the past century that it is too simple to call it the...
Emerging in France during the 1930s, this movement combined working-class milieus with moody, proto-noir art direction to stylishly represent contemporary social conditions.
Arguably the most celebrated Japanese filmmaker of all time, Akira Kurosawa had a career that spanned from the Second World War to the early nineties and that stands as a monument of artistic and personal achievement.
Delicately riding the line between pulp and art, these films refuse to be marginalized, lower budgets and lack of Hollywood gloss be damned.