The Criterion Collection
Nov 9, 2008 — Ken Ogata was a brave and talented actor. He took chances in a system that discouraged risk taking. I had been told that no reputable Japanese actor would star in Mishima because of the controversy surrounding Mishima and the notion...
Nov 6, 2008 — In Rashomon, there may be four plausible versions of the murder, but when Academy Film Archive director Michael Pogorzelski began overseeing a brand-new digital restoration of the film, he could locate only two usable prints. In a special NPR podcast,...
Nov 2, 2008 — Geoffrey Macnab posts a touching personal tribute to British writer-producer-director Sidney Gilliat, “one of the unsung heroes of British cinema, an extraordinarily versatile figure who wrote and directed rip-roaring thrillers, satirical comedies, and home-front social dramas,” in the Guardian, marking...
Nov 2, 2008 — It’s all things Quantum of Solace these days, with the latest in the Bond franchise opening next week. And Newsweek took the opportunity to ask Swiss director Marc Forster what his film influences were. He came up with a very...
Essays
Nov 2, 2008 — To see the gorgeous Fanfan la Tulipe is to go back in time twice over: to the film’s eighteenth-century French setting and to the international cinema world of more than fifty years ago, when this genial action farce was initially...
One of cinema’s great modern directors, this larger-than-life maestro created an inimitable cinematic style combining surreal carnival with incisive social critique.
"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...
Is it a genre, a movement, a fashion statement? However one defines noir, its appeal never seems to wane.
Emerging in France during the 1930s, this movement combined working-class milieus with moody, proto-noir art direction to stylishly represent contemporary social conditions.
Oct 30, 2008 — In town for the New York Film Festival screenings of his much-admired A Christmas Tale, French director Arnaud Desplechin talked to Dennis Lim about his always allusive filmmaking style and his particular influences in making this dysfunctional-family holiday film, including...